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The University of California announced this week that it is temporarily suspending its fall 2002 study abroad program in India in light of escalating tensions between India and Pakistan.

Currently no UC students are in India, but 15 were scheduled to attend programs in Delhi and Hyderabad this summer. Five of the students are from UC Berkeley.

“When we send students overseas to study, the number one priority for the University of California has got to be student safety,” said UC spokesman Hanan Eisenman.

The university made its decision after considering the U.S. State Department’s May 31 advisory to American citizens to leave India because of growing hostilities between India and Pakistan. The two countries are disputing the state of Kashmir.

On Wednesday, the State Department issued an updated, more strongly-worded advisory.

“Conditions along India's border with Pakistan and in the state of Jammu & Kashmir have deteriorated,” the statement read, urging U.S. citizens to leave the region. “Tensions have risen to serious levels, and the risk of intensified military hostilities between India and Pakistan cannot be ruled out.”

The statement noted that terrorist groups, some with links to al-Qaida, are operating in the area.

“We have to take it seriously when the State Department (issues an advisory),” Eisenmann said.

The university will leave the infrastructure and staff of its study abroad program in place and could renew the program.

“We’re going to monitor the situation,” Eisenmann said. “If things improve, the program could still go forward.”

Earlier this semester, the university recalled students from Israel in response to growing Israeli-Palestinian tensions. But because UC operates only a fall program in that country, it does not face the prospect of recalling students from India this semester.

In the past the university suspended study abroad programs in China, after the Tiananmen Square uprisings; in the Middle East, during the Gulf War and in Indonesia, during the civil unrest of 1999.

SEATTLE – A bank robber caught a lucky break when his getaway was interrupted by a funeral.

Dozens of officers were about to catch the robber at a fast-food outlet when shots rang out nearby. After racing to the scene, officers learned that the gunfire came from a military honor guard shooting blanks in a salute at a veteran’s funeral.

The episode began Tuesday afternoon when a man passed a note demanding money to a teller at a Wells Fargo Bank branch at a Safeway store on Capitol Hill, police officer Deanna Nollette said.

He did not show a weapon but took an undisclosed amount of the money, flagged down a taxicab and fled, Nollette said.

As officers were being told the robber might have gotten out of the cab and entered a Jack In The Box outlet, they heard the gun salute from a funeral home down the block.

“We all assumed this guy was cranking off rounds somewhere,” Nollette said.

The misunderstanding was soon cleared up, and investigators found a discarded sweat shirt and pair of pants they believe had been worn by the bank robber.

“Now we have a really good idea who he is,” Nollette said.

Moose on the loose

MENOMONIE, Wis. – The Moose Lodge is without its 400-pound fiberglass mascot after someone went to a lot of trouble to steal it.

The bronze-colored moose statue, which is 6 feet tall and 7 feet long, was stolen over the weekend from Moose Lodge 1584, said Terry Tilleson, a lodge member and past administrator.

The moose, valued at $2,000, has been bolted to the east side of the lodge for two years, Tilleson said.

“They took the bolts out,” Tilleson said. “It took great effort to take it. They took the time to scope it out and knew what they needed for tools.”

A ladder must have been used, police said.

The lodge replaced the moose a few years ago after the statue’s head was ripped off in a theft, Tilleson said.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Taxpayers could end up paying thousands of dollars to accommodate some state senators who don’t like the way seats in the new Missouri Senate have been arranged.

A resolution passed in the waning moments of the recently completed legislative session directs the state to change the Senate desks back to their traditional configuration, which could cost as much as $148,000.

“I don’t think a lot of people who signed it realized what the cost was,” Senate Administrator Michael Keathley said.

The resolution states that the seating changes were made without Senate consent which “compromises proper order, safety and decorum in the chamber.”

One of those who backed the May 17 measure was Sen. Marvin Singleton.

The committee could choose to spend the $148,400 for extensive changes or $6,600 to shift just a few desks. It could also choose to do nothing.

Senate President Pro Tem Peter Kinder said Tuesday that lawmakers did not have time to review the costs of the resolution before approving it.

Sedge Thomson wrote a June 5 letter advocating a 15 mph speed limit. Outrageously generous! Berkeley's property owners deserve to slow interlopers to even lower speeds. I propose a citywide limit of negative 15 (yes, minus-fifteen) miles per hour.

If Berkeley is going to be backward - squandering a generation's gains in pollution-reduction technology by forcing vehicles to crawl at mechanically inefficient, gas-wasting, pollution-intensive speeds - I say we should force all vehicles within our city walls to literally move backward. Bikes, skateboards, and pedestrians too!

If that sounds absurd...well, so is the City Council's notion of a 20 mph limit. This would require us to blight neighborhood streets with a forest of only-in-Berkeley "20 mph" signs. For the same money, we could far better protect public safety and the city budget by hiring enough traffic police to really enforce the statewide 25 mph "basic speed law." Shouldn't we do that instead?

St. Mary’s High senior Chase Moore was selected by the Pittsburgh Pirates during the Major League Baseball Amateur Draft on Wednesday. The Pirates selected Moore with the 1153rd overall pick, the first selection of the 39th round.

Moore, a three-sport star, was the Panthers’ centerfielder and cleanup hitter this season, leading the team to the Bay Shore Athletic League championship game. In addition to being named to the All-BSAL team for baseball, Moore was also an all-league receiver in football and honorable mention for basketball.

Coming into his senior year, baseball was considered Moore’s weakest sport, as he was a starter for the state-champion 2001 basketball team and a physical force on the football field. But the 6-foot-4, 200-pound Moore put in hours of work to improve his fielding and plate discipline, and it paid off with a stellar final baseball season that attracted more than a dozen scouts to St. Mary’s games.

“I would say that going back to last year, Chase really started to work on his game and take baseball more seriously,” St. Mary’s baseball coach Andy Shimabukuro said. “It’s difficult playing three sports, but he even took time off during basketball season to do baseball stuff on the weekends.”

Shimabukuro said Moore is the best overall athlete he has ever coached.

“In terms of the all-around package, combining size, speed and strength, Chase has the most tools of anyone that I’ve had,” he said.

St. Mary’s athletic director and football coach Jay Lawson said Moore set his focus for the future on baseball despite a promising season on the football field after a year out of the sport.

Moore actually had an offer for a football scholarship from San Jose State, which signed teammate Trestin George. But Moore said his top choice right now is to play baseball in college, and he is hopeful that getting drafted will attract more attention from Division I schools. He has a tentative offer from Fresno State, but a coaching change at the school has delayed a decision from both school and player.

“People have told me that a lot more offers will be coming in now,” Moore said. “I’m still looking at Fresno State. I definitely want to go to a four-year school and get my education.”

The last three months have been a “nightmare” for 24 year-old Israeli Roy Gordon.

Gordon, who is in the midst of a Bay Area tour of community meetings and media outlets, was working as a bartender at the popular Moment Cafe in Jerusalem the night a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 11 people and wounded more than 50 on March 9.

The al-Aqsa Brigades, linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, and the Islamic militant group Hamas both claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred just across the street from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s official residence.

“I was just bending down behind the bar, I was looking for a bottle, and there was a massive explosion,” said Gordon. “I understood immediately that it was a suicide bombing.

“I stood up and I saw many horrible sights,” he continued, describing the mangled bodies on the ground. “We knew all of them – they were customers and friends... . For me, the last three months were a nightmare.”

Gordon and 22 year-old Na’ama Harel, a Moment bartender who left the cafe just 10 minutes before the bombing and raced back after the explosion, arrived in the Bay Area on Monday. The trip was paid for by a Palo Alto Jewish couple who wants the story told in the United States.

Gordon and Harel are scheduled to travel today to Sacramento and New York City. They have no firm date yet for returning to Jerusalem.

Harel said the pair has no political agenda.

“We think it is (important) that people who are not politicians or ambassadors or journalists come here and tell their stories,” said Harel. “We don’t want anything – we don’t want money, we don’t want help.”

Both defended the Israeli government’s handling of the current conflict. Harel supports Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decree not to negotiate with Palestinians while the suicide bombings continue.

“You can’t sit down and talk to people who are killing you,” she said.

Gordon, a former paratrooper, made a distinction between suicide bombers who kill civilians and the Israeli military which, he argues, seeks out Palestinian terrorists and avoids civilian casualties.

Hoang Phan, a leader of the UC Berkeley-based, pro-Palestinian group Students for Justice in Palestine, said that Gordon echoes the Israeli government’s voice that claims to avoid hurting civilians. But Phan said the Israeli military killed several Palestinian civilians in an April assault on the Jenin refugee camp, and he criticizes the Israeli government for blocking a UN investigation into the two-week siege of Jenin.

“If they were so confident (that they were avoiding civilian casualties), they shouldn’t have had a problem with a UN-sponsored fact-finding mission,” he said.

Harel is hoping that peace will eventually take hold in Israel and Palestine, but was disheartened by a suicide bombing Wednesday morning in Jerusalem that killed 17 people.

“Yesterday, I was more optimistic,” she said.

In the meantime, she has enjoyed her time in the Bay Area.

“We came out here and sat outside at a cafe and it was so nice,” she said. “In Jerusalem, you sit inside and you watch where you sit.”

When our neighborhood shoemaker’s wife started making shoes, the shoes didn’t fit right anymore… When my high school math teacher became ill and her husband came to teach us, somehow, although he did know math, he wasn’t as good of teacher as she was.

So, I learned at a very early age that one can get much better results from people who have expertise, if one only let people do what they know how to do. To take their place one needs to become very determined, study, and work hard to become an expert himself.

The action by some 140 University of California professors, including 68 from UC Berkeley who signed a petition calling on the university to divest from Israel, joining professors at Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Tufts University who have taken similar action, defies that simple but proven common sense. Yes, one can assume that these people are knowledgeable in their fields or, they wouldn’t become professors at these well-known universities, but expertise in biology or history or even in mathematics doesn’t make you an expert in investment or world affairs.

We all know that these people want to bring peace to the Middle East However, the assumption that the effect of divesting from Israel will cause what they think it will, is way off.

These professors assume that if Israel will give back to the Arabs what the Arabs lost when they tried to take it all, it will bring an end to this war.

Israel withdrew from Lebanon, giving “land for peace”. It didn’t stop the Hezbollah from shelling Israeli towns from Lebanon. The exact opposite is true. When Israeli soldiers moved away, the Hezbollah could reach farther into Israel and ever since used this opportunity for a new menu of daily shelling which is about to bring a new war between Israel and Syria.

What the Arabs are calling “a just and equitable peace” is a slogan that was designed to keep the “cause” in front of the eyes of the people who pay the money to keep running their terrorist organizations and keep its top operators happy and well fed.

Unfortunately, some 140 University of California professors just got an “F” in “World affairs” and sadly also an “F” in Investment criteria. The good news is that they care and for that we should give them a C+ for trying.

Jacob Coakley Special to the Daily Planet

Thursday June 06, 2002

The playfulness of the venue, the beat from a live DJ and the exuberance of the cast make Impact Theater’s "Love is the Law" light up into a true party. And playwright Zay Amsbury is smart enough to know that no party is complete without a little drama. Raver-boy Kenzie, deadened to the rave “love drug” ecstasy because of overuse, is ready to leave the party - until he meets Sarah, and they hit it off. That night Sarah drops a bomb: she’s with the Drug Enforcement Agency. She’s not there to shut the drug-laden rave down – or is she? It all depends on Kenzie.

David Ballog is perfectly cast as Kenzie. Ballog has appeared in several of Impact’s productions and keeps getting better with each show. He brings the right amount of fluid angst and earnestness to Kenzie. And Bernadette Quattrone brings a touching haplessness to her rookie DEA role, but also imbues the agent with a real strength. They’re the core of this play and they do a great job.

Kevin O’Malley plays Sarah’s DEA partner King, and nearly steals the show with his Texas drawl and lackadaisical manner. His teasing nature makes sure nothing comes across too seriously except when he wants it to. Lisa Hori-Garcia is as sexy and dangerous as a concealed handgun, playing Kenzie’s best friend Victoria Storm. Perry Smith commands the stage as Ann.

Director Christopher Morrison makes the play pop. He’s taken a potentially talky piece and staged it with incredible energy and movement. He works against some of the more self-righteous elements in the script (ecstasy’s use as a "sacrament") and keeps things fun.

The set and space are the first stage elements to hit the audience, and the two elements are truly remarkable. In the basement of LaVal’s Pizzeria, Chris Hammer has made what is perhaps the most difficult space in Berkeley in which to work and made it intimate, funky and hip. He’s wrapped the space in varying materials and textures so that onlookers forget where they are. With a deft, mini-disco ball touch he creates separate spaces in the small theatre. Blake Manship’s moody lighting aids in the transformation. Music permeates to great effect.

Anne Marie Wilson’s costumes make the cast look exquisitely hip – except for those who are not supposed to look hip. Wilson’s costume for a girl called "rave utility belt" drew one of the first big laughs of the evening.

One of the play’s overriding themes – drug use as a viable religious experience – seemed forced and patently false. This is ground that has been well-traveled by and is familiar to many living in the Bay Area. Kenzie’s dilemma with his drug use putting him and his friends in danger is dramatic on its own, without overtones of Jesus in the Garden of Eden preparing to sacrifice himself. When playwright Amsbury comes back from that conceit to focus mainly on the interplay between the characters, his sharpness as an author comes out and the play finds its footing again.

Impact’s program refers to the show as a "rave romantic comedy." They’ve made it that and a great party with cool music, lots of laughs and even a random hook up or two.

YOKOHAMA, Japan – The U.S. team wasted no time rebounding from the bottom of the soccer world.

The Americans scored in the fourth minute, led 3-0 by the 36th and held on for a stunning 3-2 victory over Portugal in the World Cup opener for both teams Wednesday.

“We came out quick,” said Brian McBride, who scored the winner with a powerful header. “They are a very good team, so we put the pressure on them. We took advantage of our chances and when they came on strong, we held them off.”

Portugal is ranked fifth in the world. The Americans were the worst team at the 1998 World Cup, and didn’t have offensive standouts Claudio Reyna and Clint Mathis, both injured, on Wednesday.

But from the beginning at Suwon, South Korea, the U.S. team was the aggressor. With John O’Brien’s early goal, they already had matched their scoring total in ’98, when they lost all three first-round games, bickering all the way.

They didn’t stop producing after O’Brien left-footed in a rebound from close range. In the 29th minute, a shot by Landon Donovan deflected in off a defender.

Then McBride converted a cross from Tony Sanneh, and even the Americans were marveling at their lead.

“I think Portugal was the same way,” said O’Brien, one of six American starters making their World Cup debuts.

Portugal quickly got one back, then got a second-half own goal when defender Jeff Agoos deflected a cross past goalkeeper Brad Friedel. But the Portuguese ran out of gas and the folks back home who stayed up late or got up early to watch on television — the game began at 5 a.m. EDT — were rewarded.

“I think this victory will grab the attention of a lot of people in the United States,” U.S. coach Bruce Arena said.

Ireland grabbed some attention, too, with its last-minute goal for a 1-1 tie with Germany. The Germans seemed set to be the first team to advance to the second round, but Robbie Keane knocked home a backheaded pass from Niall Quinn after a long pass from Steve Finnan.

Keane celebrated with cartwheels as hundreds of Ireland fans cheered wildly in the stands at Ibaraki, Japan.

Ireland coach Mick McCarthy said, “We threw men forward and it paid off. I think we were the better side. The stats will back it up. We were the better team.”

They certainly were the happier team.

“I’m extremely angry and disappointed. When you’re 1-0 up with one minute to go and concede a goal, it hurts,” said German coach Rudi Voeller.

Russia beat Tunisia 2-0 at Kobe, Japan, getting goals five minutes apart by Egor Titov and Valery Karpin, the second on a penalty kick.

The two Americans and one Russian aboard the international space station were informed promptly of their teams’ victories.

“During the radio communication sessions, flight controllers told the crew of all the latest developments. And since the crew is made up of real soccer fans, the news was received more than happily,” Viktor Blagov, deputy director of Russian Mission Control said.

Brazil’s Rivaldo was fined $7,000 for faking an injury in the late stages of his team’s opening 2-1 victory over Turkey.

FIFA cracked down on Rivaldo under its “simulation” rule — pretending to have been fouled.

“I wasn’t worried about suspension,” Rivaldo said. “I was the injured party. I don’t even know why I was fined.

“In soccer, you have to be sly. It happens a lot and it will happen a lot in this World Cup,” he added.

In the latest effort to make it easier for fans to obtain tickets and boost attendance at first-round games, FIFA has decided to allow telephone sales.

Tickets returned after overseas fans were being offered on the Internet, but high demand was swamping FIFA’s Web site. Half the tickets still available for games in Japan and South Korea will be sold by telephone. In phone sales for two games Wednesday and one Thursday in Japan, thousands of tickets were snapped up in minutes.

News of a 75 percent price hike at Shattuck Avenue Self-Storage has prompted Berkeley leaders to question a 10-year-old, city-funded program that pays for storage lockers for the community’s homeless.

Rain jackets, newspapers and blankets are often stashed in shopping carts and makeshift lean-tos in other cities, but in Berkeley, 99 lockers provide its homeless with free storage space. Until now the city rented the units for less than $25,000 a year. The cost, though, has swollen to above $40,000.

“When I found this out, I was alarmed at how much it was,” said City Councilmember Linda Maio.

While Maio notes that the uncommon program offers a vital city service, she wants to be sure the city is getting the most for its money. Colleagues on the council joined her last month in a unanimous agreement to pay the higher locker fees. But, at the same time, the council directed city staff to reevaluate the program.

“I’ve learned that the whole storage thing has not been properly handled,” said Maio.

City officials concede that in the past this was true.

Until about a year ago, at the storage lot on the corners of Shattuck and Ward Street, little was known about the people using city lockers or if the storage accounts were even active, according to Harvey Tureck, the city’s manager of Mental Health Services. But this has changed, he said.

“We’re trying to bring more order to the process,” Tureck explained. “We’ve had to access all of the lockers and the people and evaluate their current needs.”

The city’s 99 lockers, at 5 feet by 5 feet by four feet, now serve homeless who genuinely need storage space, Tureck said.

“If you’re someone trying to get back on your feet and get a job, you’re going to have stuff and need a place to put it,” he said. “We’re certainly more careful now [about who uses the lockers].”

Tureck and his staff are slated to update City Council on the status of the locker program at a July 23 meeting.

As for the program’s 75 percent cost hike, city officials say the increase was a long-time coming and that rates charged by Shattuck Avenue Self-Storage are still below market.

The locker program dates back to 1993 and, in addition to serving the homeless community, has been credited with improving the aesthetics of parks and other public spaces where homeless have historically left their belongings.

“It has benefited the clients and the community,” said Eric Landes-Brenman, the city’s homeless coordinator who helped found the locker program.

The program has helped people make the transition from the street to permanent housing, he said.

The only apparent problem has been a recent complaint from neighbors of the storage who say they have had trouble with some of the locker users.

The manager of Shattuck Avenue Self-Storage was not available for comment yesterday.

Regarding the proposed project to demolish the Darling Flower Shop at 2008 University Ave. and build housing there, I think we’ve reached a point where, once again, Berkeley risks becoming the laughing stock of the Bay Area. Make no mistake: Designating the current building a "structure of merit," which the Landmarks Preservation Commission wants to do, is an obvious ploy to stop development. With two bus routes on the block and BART an easy walk away, the proposed 35-unit apartment building is clearly the best choice for Berkeley.

What's especially troubling about the latest attempt of Berkeley's arch-conservative NIMBYs to stop any kind of progress in our city is that the particular structure in question is astoundingly ugly. Yes, there appears to be an old-ish house somewhere behind the bland 1950s façade. But even what's left of the house has been completely stripped of any architectural or visual appeal. The whole property should be labeled a "structure of demerit." Demolishing it would do all of us a favor.

This time the NIMBYs are going too far. Saving one of Berkeley's most unattractive buildings in the name of historical and architectural preservation is a travesty. The emperor—in this case the Landmarks Preservation Commission—has no clothes, and it's not a pretty sight.

Cal senior second baseman Carson White was selected by the Colorado Rockies in the 23rd round of the 2002 Major League Amateur Draft.

White, a first team All-Pac-10 pick in 2001 and an honorable mention All-Pac-10 selection this past season, batted .339 with 15 doubles, seven home runs and 32 RBI. He also had the game-winning RBI Feb. 17 versus Long Beach State and hit a game-winning home run Mar. 25 at Washington State. A transfer from Fresno City College, the 5-foot-8, 175-pound White finished his two-year Cal career batting .338 with 88 runs, 153 hits, 34 doubles, four triples, 15 home runs and 81 RBI.

White joins senior right-hander Trevor Hutchinson and junior catcher John Baker as Cal baseball players selected in the 2002 professional baseball draft. Hutchinson was selected in the third round by the Florida Marlins and Baker was selected in the fourth round by the Oakland A's.

Warm weather and high winds caused the California Department of Forestry to declare fire season early this year. The wind has dried grass rapidly. The warm temperatures have also fueled the dangerous conditions, say California fire safety officials.

“Our concern is always the whole state – virtually the whole state is at risk, ” said CDF Public Information Officer Karen Terrill. Officials are watching residential areas built on or near wildland. “We are most concerned when the urban lifestyle is mixed with the wildland. People move into areas like the foothills and attempt to continue to live the same kind of lifestyles they had in the urban areas.”

Several common, modern conveniences, such as lawnmowers, are threats in the foothills and other wildland areas, fire officials said. Accidents with outdoor cooking appliances can cause fires. Barbecues, for example, can throw sparks into dry areas.

The three counties CDF is most concerned about are in Southern California and are San Diego, San Bernadino and Riverside counties.

“Those areas went on fire season in mid-April,” Terrill said. “We are already seeing burning conditions there that we don’t usually see until mid-September. It’s as dry kiln dry lumber, and it’s ready to burn.”

The current alert in Northern California is moderate.

Terrill said that concerned citizens can log onto www.nifc.gov/news/outlook_map.html to watch areas under fire alert. Also on the Web site is advice fire officials want citizens to follow to protect themselves and firefighters.

“Generally speaking, create a defensible space around your property that gives our firefighters a chance to protect you and your house,” Terrill said about fire prepping the home.

In addition, it suggests that rooftops be cleared of leaves, twigs and pine needs.

“That just like having kindling over your head,” Terrill said. According to Terrill, most houses in California wildland burn from the roof down.

People are also advised to trim tree branches away from the home and to plan emergency escape routes in case of fire.

“We want people to live and enjoy California’s wildland, but we want people to be fire safe. If you live in the wild lands there are certain things you have to do that you wouldn’t if you lived in the city,” Terrill said. “The whole idea is to give our firefighters a safe places where they can set up and protect you.”

Berkeley’s library system will be doing its part to fight off summer doldrums.

The newly renovated and expanded Central Library is ready to take on its first summer since reopening April 6. No longer cramped in the temporary confines of its Kitterage location, the Central Library has many events planned for what promises to be a healthy increase of patrons. Much of this effort will be directed toward children.

The library is offering a summer reading program for those entering grades one through eight to help children maintain or improve reading skills they’ve worked on throughout the school year. The program starts June 14 and lasts until mid-August. A similar program targeted at teenagers called “Cover to Cover” starts June 17.

“Just like playing a sport or musical instrument, reading is a skill that must be practiced regularly, or kids loose ground, “ says Linda Perkins, manager of Children’s Services. “Research has shown that children who stop reading on the last day of school in June will not be ready for the first day of school in September.”

Children will be encouraged to read 10 books or 1,000 pages this summer.

Beyond the reading program, the staff of the children’s section has many other ideas for parents who want to keep their children reading while school is not in session. Some suggestions include reading during family activities and providing children with reading material.

Already underway, the library is hosting a children’s story time on the first Saturday of each month. A guest story teller will present each story. Traveling storyteller Joel ben Izzy, author of “Lights and Laughter,” will perform on Aug. 3.

Some of the preformances, like the one this month that featured musician and songwriter Gerry Tenney, will be accompanied by music and a sing-a-long. Story time is aimed at children between three and seven, and includes games and other activities.

In addition to regularly scheduled events, the children’s section will host a number of features and activities. The schedule includes magicians, puppet shows and performances by ventriloquists.

REDWOOD CITY – Worldwide semiconductor sales are expected to increase 3.1 percent in 2002 and jump 23.2 percent in 2003, according to a midyear forecast released Wednesday by an industry trade group.

The Semiconductor Industry Association, which represents most U.S. chip makers, said the market is now in the initial phases of recovery after its most challenging year in history.

“Our expectation is that the recovery will gain momentum in the second half of the year and continue with strong growth through 2003 and 2004,” said Dwight W. Decker, chief executive of Conexant Systems and a semiconductor association board member.

Worldwide sales of all chips are expected to total $143 billion in 2002, $177 billion in 2003 and $213 billion — a 20.9 percent increase — in 2004. Another slowdown is expected by 2005.

The growth will be fueled by increases in sales of cellular phones and personal computers as well as other digital consumer electronics equipment.

The Asia Pacific market is leading the recovery. Sales are expected to increase 27 percent to $51 billion in 2002 — the only region that will see a year-over-year sales growth this year.

The Americas, on the other hand, are expected to decline 4 percent to $35 billion in 2002 but grow 24 percent to $43 billion in 2003 and 22 percent to $52 billion in 2004.

The Semiconductor Industry Association has represented U.S. chip manufacturers since 1977. Its members account for more than 90 percent of U.S. chip production.

SAN JOSE – Internet auction leader eBay Inc. is trying to fight fraud on the site with a new software program that scans for suspicious listings and alerts company investigators, chief executive Meg Whitman said Wednesday.

The Fraud and Abuse Detection Engine, or FADE, quietly was deployed this spring to help the company crack down on con artists who misrepresent their merchandise or dupe buyers into paying for goods that never arrive, Whitman told investors at eBay’s annual shareholder meeting.

Though Whitman said fraud makes up less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all transactions on eBay, the company worries that high-profile cons damage the site’s reputation.

In the last two years, for example, authorities have arrested eBay users who sold a fake Richard Diebenkorn painting for $135,000 and a man who made thousands unloading baseball bats he claimed had been used by major league stars.

FADE is programmed to raise alarms about listings with telltale signs of potential trouble. As an example, Whitman said a first-time seller in Romania offering a laptop computer starting at $1 would be a likely target.

Once the system alerts eBay of a potential con artist, company staff examines the listing and the personal information the seller has provided. If the humans are as suspicious as the computer, eBay will call or e-mail the seller to verify certain information, Rob Chesnut, eBay’s deputy general counsel, said after the meeting.

Chesnut said FADE already has helped prevent potential fraud, though he would not elaborate. He compared the program to systems used by credit card companies that monitor for suspicious spending patterns.

During the sparsely attended shareholder meeting, which lasted less than an hour, Whitman reaffirmed earlier forecasts that San Jose-based eBay will earn 73 cents to 75 cents per share this year, though the consensus estimate on Wall Street is 76 cents.

Separately Wednesday, a wireless-technology company called InPhonic Inc. launched a service that can alert eBay buyers on their cell phones when they’ve been outbid on an item and let them increase their bid by typing in a message on the keypad.

There have been other wireless trading services for eBay users, but none has proven popular.

Shares of eBay fell 14 cents to $55.01 in trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

SAN FRANCISCO – Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, say the state could see warmer temperatures and a smaller snowpack over the next half-century because of global warming, a change that could diminish water supplies in a state already familiar with drought.

The researchers found that in 50 years, the San Francisco Bay area could see an average temperature increase of 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit over current norms, and the Los Angeles area could see an increase of 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit. In the Sierra Nevada, that increase could be significantly higher — as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit in May.

The study also shows the snowpack could decrease by half in the next 50 years, affecting California’s water supply. The snowpack acts as a reservoir, storing water during the winter and releasing it as it melts.

The report is to be published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. It looks at the effects of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from preindustrial times.

State agencies have established a task force to assess how global warming will affect life in California. That includes how changes in precipitation could affect the state’s forests. Andrea Tuttle, director of the Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, said one concern is the increased fire danger of drier forests.

The UC Santa Cruz research team, led by Lisa Sloan, associate professor of earth sciences, used computer modeling to look only at California, instead of using more common global modeling systems.

“The hope is studies at this level of detail can produce information for people who want to do something about global warming,” Sloan said.

California’s ecosystems and people depend on the balance of snow and rainfall.

“The snow is a very opportune storage medium in that it releases its water in the spring and summer after the real storminess has died down,” said Dan Cayan, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher and director of the Climate Research Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

With global warming, “there is going to be earlier and more runoff so we’re going to be in a situation that reservoir capacity isn’t going to be able to store everything,” Cayan said.

Scripps has also done computer modeling to show that much of California’s precipitation would fall as rain instead of snow.

HANFORD– A priest accused of raping a 16-year-old girl who worked as a clerk in his parish will stand trial, a judge has ruled.

Miguel Flores, 34, is charged with three counts of forcible rape and dissuading a witness. If convicted of all charges, the priest could face up to 26 years in prison.

Prosecutors said Flores raped the girl in January at the St. Paul Church in Tranquillity and twice more in February at Hanford’s Immaculate Heart of Mary Church.

Hanford police investigator Bruce Blodgett told the court Tuesday about an incident on Feb. 16 when Flores allegedly grabbed the girl after she was finished with bookkeeping and pushed her into the bedroom quarter in the church residence.

Flores reportedly told the teen-age girl he had fallen in love with her and then raped her, Blodgett testified. He also said Flores threatened her, saying she would regret it if she told anybody what had happened.

Defense attorney Richard Conway questioned the girl’s credibility. Conway said she failed to tell police in the first interview about two other alleged rapes at the Tranquillity and Hanford churches.

Conway also wondered why the girl, if she had been raped, would follow Flores to the Hanford church after his transfer. Prosecutors said she was blackmailed into staying with Flores.

Flores is scheduled to be arraigned June 20 in Kings County Superior Court.

On Wednesday, police also searched the Truckee-area vacation property of Pinole resident Stephen Kiesle, a defrocked priest arrested in May on three counts of child molestation, for a possible connection to the widely publicized disappearance of Amber Swartz in 1988.

Kiesle lived on the same street as Amber, 7, in Pinole when she disappeared, said Pinole police Commander John Miner.

LOS ANGELES – A dazzling solar eclipse will be on display across a broad swath of the western United States, Mexico, Canada and Asia on Monday, with as much as 99 percent of the sun obscured by the moon.

One of the best U.S. views will be in San Diego where as much as three-fourths of the sun will be hidden.

Other sections of the country will get a less dramatic sight. In Chicago, only one-fifth of the sun’s surface will be blocked. The Eastern Seaboard will miss the eclipse entirely because it will occur after sunset there.

The early evening event is called an annular, or ring-shaped, eclipse. Because the moon will be farther from the Earth than during total eclipses, it will only partially cover the distant sun. It will be the last eclipse visible from the United States until 2005.

In places such as the tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, the moon will darken all but only the glowing rim of the sun for about a minute, said Fred Espenak, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration astrophysicist and eclipse expert. The eclipse will begin at 5:13 p.m. PDT, with best viewing time around 6:20.

“If you’re in the path, you’d see, instead of a typical sunset, an extremely thin ring — a ring of fire — setting into the ocean,” said Espenak, who plans to be there to watch.

The moon’s shadow will follow an 8,700-mile path, racing eastward from Asia across the Pacific Ocean at 1,000 mph. In Asia, across the international date line, the eclipse actually occurs Tuesday.

Because it’s a partial eclipse, the sun’s light will be only dimmed.

“It’s like a light cloud passing in front of the sun,” said John Mosley, an astronomer at the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles.

Even though it’s a partial eclipse, Mosley warned against looking directly at the sun.

Instead, he recommended peering through commercially available solar filters, which block all but a fraction of the sun’s light. Viewers also can use binoculars, not to look through, but to safely project the sun’s image onto an index card.

A Dec. 4 total eclipse will be visible from southern Africa and Australia.

More than 140 University of California professors, including 68 from UC Berkeley, signed a petition calling on the university to divest from Israel, joining professors at Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Tufts University who have taken similar action.

But critics say divestment would not help Israeli and Palestinian citizens suffering from conflict in the Middle East. The chairman of the UC Board of Regents indicated the university will not divest anytime soon.

The professors unveiled the petition drive at a press conference at UC Berkeley’s Faculty Club Tuesday afternoon.

“It is time for us unequivocally to side with peace and Palestinian independence in every possible way,” said Susan Ervin-Tripp, professor emeritus of psychology at UC Berkeley.

The university has over $7 billion invested in companies that either produce or sell weapons and weapons technology in Israel or have subsidiaries or branches in Israel, according to Students for Justice in Palestine, a campus group that has helped coordinate the petition drive.

The student group cites companies ranging from Cisco Systems, to General Electric, to Coca-Cola and AOL Time Warner.

“As Students for Justice in Palestine, we believe this is completely unacceptable,” said UC Berkeley graduate student and SJP leader Snehal Shingavi. “The economic relationship between our university and the military dominance in Israel must stop.”

Members of the Board of Regents, who would ultimately make a decision on divestment, did not return calls by the Planet’s deadline. But John J. Moores, chairman of the Board, issued a statement welcoming dialogue and downplaying the possibility of divestment.

“Living thousands of miles away, members of the UC community seek practical ways to further the pursuit of peace in the Middle East,” the statement read. “The Regents value and welcome ideas of faculty, staff and students in exploring such opportunities, including issues of economic divestment.

“The Regents also have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the security of the University’s pension and endowment funds,” the Moores statement continued. “Those investments currently provide benefits to thousands of UC retirees and support University scholarships and research efforts.”

But Ervin-Tripp argued that divestment from South Africa in the 1980s did not hurt the University of California’s bottom line.

“It’s not actually helping the people on the ground who are suffering,” said Jenni Mangel, assistant director of Berkeley Hillel, a Jewish cultural center serving students.

Mangel said university students and professors should concentrate on providing humanitarian aid to Jewish and Palestinian civilians affected by the conflict.

“I find it particularly disappointing that university faculty would be underscoring the anti-Semitic atmosphere on campus,” added Chris Silver, a member of the Israel Action Committee, a UC Berkeley student group.

Since many drivers exceed limits by 20 percent or more, a 15 mph limit means we might actually get 20 mph on our streets.

Any police officer will tell a speeder that the limit is based on conditions: It is not a mandate to go even at the limit, if conditions merit slower driving. I believe the safety of our residential streets, the quality of our our air and quiet, and our walking and biking safety merit slower driving.

Visionaries who understand that Berkeleyans value streets without the assault of cut-through speeders and commute traffic have supported diverters, speed limits, and other slowing devices over the years.

Without these protections, the population of UC-B, which according to CalTrans is the largest generator of car traffic in the Bay Area, long ago would have destroyed the city it helped create.

If the Legislature helped legalize barriers years ago to protect the liveability of our streets and the safety of our lives, I say bravo, and encore.

If Berkeley needs to seek help from the Legislature for this speed limit change, then onward! Berkeley is only following the trend of cities around the world to deal sensibly and actively to keep our cities inhabitable, not just as speedways for drivers on their ways to elsewheres.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Ohio State standout Nick Swisher joined his father, former major leaguer Steve Swisher, as a first-round baseball draft choice Tuesday.

“Me and the old man have something to share now,” the younger Swisher said. “I’m so excited, it’s ridiculous.”

So was dad. He cleared out a sporting goods store’s entire supply of Oakland Athletics caps after Nick was taken by the A’s as the 16th overall selection.

“They’re kind of different. They’re not the traditional A’s caps,” Nick Swisher said with a laugh during a family cookout Tuesday evening at his Parkersburg home. “I’m going to try to get my agent to get some.”

Nick Swisher is accustomed to being different. His cowboy boots and West Virginia upbringing earned the ribbing of his Ohio State teammates.

When he was introduced for each at-bat at home games, the public address system played “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” from the 1996 Clint Eastwood movie.

Swisher is the highest pick under 15th-year Buckeye coach Bob Todd. The switch-hitter batted .348 this season with a team-high 52 RBIs and 10 home runs. The junior played 39 games in center field and 15 at first base.

He started in all but three games in his three seasons and finished with a .323 career average.

Steve Swisher hasn’t hesitated to chime in with advice from time to time, especially about the pros.

“He has to keep everything on an even keel,” the elder Swisher said. “The highs can’t be too high and the lows can’t be too low. All the media attention in the world doesn’t make a difference on the field. You can hit the ball and have nothing to show for it.

“As long as he keeps everything in perspective and works hard, he’ll do fine.”

Steve Swisher was taken in the first round by the Chicago White Sox in 1973. He played nine seasons with the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals and San Diego Padres. He was an All-Star in 1976.

Nick Swisher has come a long way since high school, when he garnered little statewide attention despite being selected all-state three times in baseball and twice in football at Parkersburg High.

“Back in high school, nobody gave me the time of day,” he said. “It’s different now.”

Swisher said he hasn’t discussed his immediate future yet with his agent, Joe Bick of Cincinnati.

Berkeley Unified School District clerical and paraprofessional employees have voted to change their union representation, dropping Martinez-based Local 1 in favor of the Council of Classified Employees, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers.

Last month operations employees voted 70-42 to dump Local 1 in favor of AFL-CIO affiliated Local 39 in San Francisco. This week’s vote erases any Local 1 presence in Berkeley Unified, bringing an end to some 40 years of representation.

“We’re disappointed in the outcome, and we wish the employees well,” said Charles Egbert, general manager for Local 1.

CCE leaders said they won because members were sick of poor service and unreturned phone calls. Local 1 leaders said service has been strong and pointed to low voter turnout, suggesting that the tally did not truly represent the membership’s views.

About half of the members of the paraprofessional “unit” of Local 1, which includes instructional assistants and librarians, cast ballots — voting 77-46 to bring in CCE. Fifty-one of 84 eligible voters in the clerical unit, which includes secretaries and office staff, cast ballots. Twenty-seven selected CCE, 22 voted for Local 1 and two ballots were void.

“We’re really, really excited,” said Frank Oppedisano, CCE organizer. “The people have spoken. They wanted a change, and fortunately we were there to give it to them.”

But Local 1 officials say they have concerns about a new leadership slate. The current contract is scheduled to expire at the end of June and they say new negotiators will not have the proper experience to deal with the district.

“They will be starting from scratch,” said Barbara Singleton, a special education instructional assistant and president of the Local 1 paraprofessional unit. “They will have no knowledge of the district and I’m afraid the district will take advantage.”

But Oppedisano said the new leadership drawn from the employees’ ranks will have years of experience in the district. Barry Fike, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, has also offered to help. And the CCE staffers who will take part have been negotiating contracts for years, Oppedisano added.

“It’s not their first rodeo,” he said.

Singleton said she was surprised by the vote.

“I hadn’t prepared myself for a loss,” she said. Singleton noted that teachers often file complaints against instructional assistants and said she was startled that assistants would vote for a union with ties to the American Federation of Teachers.

“This local is not going to be underneath the teachers,” replied Oppedisano.

Oppedisano said service was the biggest issue in the campaign.

“That’s originally why we came in here,” he said. “They weren’t getting the basic services they needed.”

“I don’t think that’s been true the last couple of years, but that’s the perception,” replied Egbert.

Local 1 leadership in Berkeley Unified is divided between district employees who serve as unit presidents and business agents in the Martinez office.

Rick Spaid, president of the clerical unit, said the employee leadership has been strong, but argued that the Martinez office has not provided adequate service.

“Those of us in the leadership have had our own frustrations with the leadership in Martinez,” said Spaid. “I said, ‘If we lose, it’s all on you.’”

But Spaid was critical of CCE for “raiding” an independent union like Local 1 rather than organizing the unorganized.

“Union membership is dwindling nationwide,” he said. “There’s a whole lot of people who need desperately to be represented.”

“Our main interest is in providing service to classified employees,” responded Oppedisano. “When you have an independent union like Local 1...and they’re doing a subpar job of representing their classifieds, while at the same time making sure their dues are collected, it’s the employees’ right and job to get better representation.”

“I was pleased with the outcome,” said Berkeley High School instructional assistant Walter Mitchell, who voted for CCE. “Now we can focus on the business at hand.”

Affordable Housing Week is a chance to highlight the significant shortage of affordable housing in the Bay Area as well as celebrate the significant contributions of affordable housing to the lives of those who depend on it.

Throughout my years as an Assemblywoman, I have seen this area's affordable housing crisis worsen. The number of housing units available to families with low to moderate incomes is negligible compared to the rising number of those in need.

We must make significant progress to reduce the disparity between those who can and cannot afford housing. Our state is second to last in the nation in homeownership rates. A minimum-wage earner must work over 100 hours a week to be able to afford a one -bedroom apartment in the Bay Area. California has lost over 20,000 affordable housing units over the past five years, and there are over 360,000 homeless in California with the most rapidly growing segments of this population being seniors and families with children.

However, California has made significant strides in providing more affordable housing. We are exploring new and creative incentives to encourage developers to construct affordable housing, government is putting more funds towards constructing affordable housing, and we are seeing better public policy around creating more affordable housing for California's families. I have supported the efforts of my colleagues in the State Legislature to ease the growing disparity between those who have housing and those who do not.

Most notably, Senator John Burton's (D-San Francisco) $2.1 billion housing bond, if passed this November, will go far in addressing the affordable housing needs of this state. I fought to include close to $190 million for supportive housing, housing with built-in medical and social services assistance, and $15 million to fund housing for low-income UC and CSU students and staff. Affordable housing trusts, which already exist in a number of cities and counties throughout the state, are another example of what we can do to spur the construction of affordable housing units.

These trusts are pools of money from various sources set aside for affordable housing.

Affordable housing trusts must continue to be developed and supported.

On May 29th, the State Assembly adopted my ACR 209, a resolution calling upon Californians to participate in Affordable Housing Week activities and work towards diminishing our state's housing gap. Affordable Housing Week is being celebrated between June 1st and June 9th and will be marked by grand openings of affordable housing developments, forums on increasing affordable housing, and rallies throughout the state. This is a chance for people to come together in observance of the progress made around affordable housing as well connect more families with affordable housing, particularly the most vulnerable members of our community — low-income families, seniors and people with disabilities.

As California is faced with one of the most ominous budgets in recent history, it is incumbent upon all of us to come up with solutions with fewer resources, yet with greater resolve than ever before.

Your participation in Affordable Housing Week is critical. It is an opportunity for all of us to be advocates, it is a call to leadership, a challenge that must be met on behalf of those who struggle daily to meet a need which most of us take for granted.

Your efforts will be felt by thousands of families in your community. Your work can create rooftops!

Affordable Housing Week events will take place between Saturday, June 1st and Sunday, June 9th. For more information, please contact the Office of Assemblywoman Dion Aroner at (510) 540-3660.

The Cal baseball program had two players, senior right-hander Trevor Hutchinson and junior catcher John Baker, selected in the first four rounds of 2002 Major League Amateur Draft on Tuesday.

Hutchinson, a third team Preseason All-American in Baseball America, was drafted in the third round by the Florida Marlins and was the 83rd pick overall. In 2002, he was 7-5 with a 3.38 ERA, two complete games and had a team-high 94 strikeouts and 117 innings. Hutchinson became Cal’s all-time strikeout leader with 284 strikeouts from 1999-02 and is second on the Bears’ career innings pitched list (370.7). He was the April 8 Pac-10 Pitcher of the Week after an April 5 victory over UCLA and was an honorable mention All-Pac-10 selection.

Hutchinson was a 20th-round pick by the New York Mets in last year’s Amateur Draft but did not sign with the team. His agent is the notorious Scott Boras, who is known for driving hard bargains and encouraging players to hold out. Hutchinson played for the Orleans Cardinals in the Cape Cod League, going 3-3 with a 1.47 ERA and 44 strikeouts in 43 innings. He is the brother of former Stanford pitcher and quarterback Chad Hutchinson, who is currently playing quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys.

Baker, who earned first team All-Pac-10 honors this season, was drafted in the fourth round by the Oakland A’s and was the 128th pick overall. He finished the 2002 campaign batting a team-leading .383 with 12 doubles, a triple, five home runs and 29 RBI, despite missing three weeks with a broken right hand. He also had a Pac-10 leading .516 on-base percentage, and a .456 batting average against Pac-10 competition

November elections may be months away, but Berkeley leaders are preparing to meet a June deadline for submitting a list of bond proposals for the voter ballot. Most plans involve basic repairs to municipal buildings and streets.

Officials say the challenge will be asking voters for money during tight economic times.

“People don’t want a lot of new taxes right now. They’re concerned about their job. They’re concerned about the economy,” said Mayor Shirley Dean.

Subsequently, city leaders are burdened with the question of what to do about long overlooked maintenance issues such as cramped quarters at the city’s animal shelter, unfinished retrofits at old City Hall and insufficient lighting on many city streets.

“We have to really focus on the bread and butter issues right now,” said Dean amid the millions of dollars in bonds up for consideration.

The bond issues may not be sexy and easily sold to voters, but are desperately needed, city councilmembers have said at one time or another.

Council has already ruled out the notion of floating a bond to fund seismic retrofits to the city’s Veterans Building; however, nearly a half dozen other projects that could benefit from a public cash influx remain on the table.

“We can’t say yes to all of these. That would end up hurting them all,” said Councilmember Kriss Worthington, noting that chances for failure increase with every additional bond that the city seeks.

At the direction of City Council, the city manager’s office is studying possible 30-year bond financing for stormwater drains, a swimming pool for the school district, seismic retrofits for old City Hall, a new animal shelter and additional street lighting.

The cost to a taxpayer with a home valued at Berkeley’s average assessment ranges from $12 a year for construction of a new animal shelter to $50 a year for stormwater improvements, city officials said.

Taken together, all five capital projects under consideration would cost the average property owner up to $122 a year, adding to the $3100 that the average property owner now pays in property taxes.

City hall retrofits would account for $35 a year, additional street lighting would account for $23 a year and a new school pool – which is already mostly funded – could cost $2 a year, according to city officials.

City leaders are also considering a ballot measure that would make people who sell their property pay an additional 25 percent transfer tax. The tax would fund incentives for seismic improvements to private residential complexes and is being touted as a wide-reaching safety measure.

Dean called the initiative, which she expects to bring $1 million annually to city coffers, part of a plan to prevent “the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives in a major earthquake which we know is going to happen.”

The decision about which city bonds will ultimately end up on the November ballot will be influenced by any additional bonds submitted from other tax-levying authorities, councilmembers have said.

“The voters are not ATM machines,” noted Worthington.

The council is expected to determine the ballot’s contents June 25.

The school district and college districts are not seeking bond measures, and the park district, BART, and county government have not announced a definite decision, according to Deputy City Manager Phil Kamlarz.

City Council is scheduled to continue discussing potential bonds at its meetings this month.

YOKOHAMA, Japan – South Korea was the biggest star on Asia’s biggest day at the World Cup.

Playing in its sixth Cup finals, the co-host won for the first time Tuesday when it beat Poland 2-0 in Busan, South Korea.

In a stadium awash in red and ringing with the chants and cheers of their fans, the Korean players put on a soccer display worthy of the world’s powerhouses.

Striker Hwang Sun-hong, playing in his fourth World Cup, opened the scoring and Yoo Sang-chul provided the clincher for the team that now poses a major threat to keep the United States from advancing to the second round.

Tuesday wasn’t quite as successful for the other co-host, although the Japanese were satisfied with their first World Cup point. They went 0-3 in 1998, but got a thrilling 2-2 tie with Belgium at Saitama.

Japanese fans banged drums, clapped and chanted “Nippon, Nippon.” The national flag, the Hinomaru, was visible in every corner of the ground and huge banners, including one reading “Welcome to Blue Heaven,” fluttered over one stand.

China, making its World Cup debut under ex-U.S. coach Bora Milutinovic, lost 2-0 to another of his former teams, Costa Rica. Ronald Gomez and Mauricio Wright scored second-half goals in Gwangju, South Korea.

Touriel has owned the Darling Flower Shop at 2008 University Ave. for about 40 years. The flower shop is attached to the late 19th century Victorian house in which he was raised.

His plan to partner with a developer to demolish the existing structures and build a new multi-use structure has placed the small businessman in the thick of a battle between preservationists and developers who are arguing about Berkeley’s future cityscape.

“I don’t understand it at all,” Touriel said after the commission passed a motion to refer the matter to its July 1 meeting.

Touriel decided to develop his land primarily so that he could pass his business to his son and meanwhile provide for his own retirement.

To achieve this, he needed some type of steady income. Thus he formed a partnership with Panoramic Ventures, a Berkeley real estate company headed by developer Patrick Kennedy.

Under the plan the Touriels and the developer would own a stake in a new multi-use building that would include a flower shop and 35 units of housing.

Tenants there would pay for Touriel’s retirement. His son could run the flower business.

But the project was put in jeopardy when the Landmark Preservation Commission voted 5-2-2 in February to declare the Victorian a “Structure of Merit.”

This classification, which can be overturned by the city council, means that the commission must grant approval to demolish or alter the outside of the building.

The developers appealed the ruling to the council, which in a rare decision decided to remand the case back to the commission for further deliberations.

The council’s decision was based on the developers’ claim that the vote was invalid, based on the fact that one commissioner who voted to designate the Victorian had neither attended the public hearings nor had access to related materials, and was thereby not prepared to make an informed decision. Because a five-vote majority is needed to designate buildings, the motion would have failed if the commissioner had not voted.

This unusual set of circumstances clouded the debate at Monday’s meeting. The commissioners were confused about the legal implications of the council’s remand, and its obligations to the case.

Several disagreed with the developers’ claims that the remand in effect nullified the February vote, and that the commission’s authority to designate the property ended July 3. The legal ambiguities convinced a 6-3 majority to request clarification from the city attorney then return to the issue next month.

Legal issues were just one area of dispute between developers and several commission members who also clashed over the architectural and historic merit of the building.

Tim Kelly, an architectural consultant hired by the developers, agreed with a previous historical resources report that said the Victorian failed to qualify as a “structure of merit” because it had undergone so many changes.

“It’s history, but not significant history,” said Kelly, who pointed out that stucco had been laid on the building and that much of it had been rebuilt after a fire in the 1940s.

Commissioner Becky O’Malley, on the other hand, said the renovations added to Victorian’s significance.

“If you have a building that has changed over time, it in itself is part of the historical record,” she said.

The historical significance of the Victorian’s builder and first resident John Doyle was introduced as another possible reason to protect it.

Leslie Emmington, the commissioner who drafted the original application for designation, researched Doyle and found him mentioned often in the Berkeley Herald around the turn of the 20th century. From this she concluded that the key issue was not the building’s Victorian integrity, but whether it makes a valuable contribution to Berkeley’s architectural history.

Patrick Kennedy insisted that the commissioner’s arguments were just a ruse. “Certain members of the LPC are anti-development masking as preservationists,” said Kennedy, who claimed that the LPC often uses delay tactics to hinder a developer’s ability to move ahead with projects.

“Berkeley is the only city in Northern California that lost housing in the last 20 years,” said Kennedy. “ The evidence suggests that the LPC and others do well in preventing development.”

O’Malley defended the commission’s rulings. “He [Kennedy] seems to have targeted historic sights,” said O’Malley who also argued that developers such as Kennedy are usually ultimately successful in getting their projects approved, even over the objections of the commission.

“He gets what he wants partly from political connections,” O’Malley said. She added that Kennedy and his associates have a lot of influence in city council, because they make generous political donations.

According to Chris Hudson, the project will continue to move forward while the designation remains unresolved. The project has been approved by Design Review and will go before the Zoning Adjustment Board this month. He is confident that if the commission again designates the Victorian, it will be overturned.

For Victor Touriel the stakes are potentially high. The flower shop occupies the downstairs of the Victorian, while the upstairs is used for storage. If he is not permitted to develop the property, which also includes a small parking lot, its resale value may be affected. “I spent all my money on my family, now this was my retirement,” Touriel said.

RANCHO SANTA FE –The schools are outstanding, there’s almost no crime and the sun shines 320 days a year. Only residents can join the community’s world-class golf club.

“It’s a wonderful place,” said Annie Perez, who owns Bolero Mexican cafe in the tiny downtown area and lives nearby. “This is the best life.”

But only the rich need apply. Rancho Santa Fe ranks as the nation’s wealthiest community with 1,000 households or more, according to Census figures released Tuesday.

The per capita income of more than $113,000 puts Rancho Santa Fe ahead of the Bay Area enclaves of Atherton and Woodside as well as Palm Beach, Fla. and Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Census figures show. Indian River Shores, Fla., ranked No. 1 in 1990, was seventh in the latest survey.

The average per capita income in the United States was less than $22,000 a year, according to the 2000 Census.

Rancho Santa Fe was also the most expensive place to buy a house in the United States over the past year. The median single family home price is $1.7 million, according to DataQuick Information Systems of San Diego.

But few residents are complaining about high home prices.

“I consider myself lucky,” said Albert Plattner, who lives a short walk from his real estate office in Rancho Santa Fe’s two block downtown. “I think it’s the greatest place to live in the world.”

What’s luring the wealthiest Americans? In a word, privacy.

Rancho Santa Fe’s rural feel has been zealously guarded for 74 years by a strict set of rules, called the Protective Convenant. Most properties are a minimum two acres. All homes must meet the standards set by a design board that calls itself the Art Jury, which strives to ensure that even 18,000 square-foot homes blend into the landscape.

“To buy a property up here you have to invest a lot of money,” said Keith Behner, Rancho Santa Fe’s planning director.

“But once you invest a lot of money you don’t have to worry about a McMansion going up next door that’s flamingo red.”

Only residents can join the community’s golf and tennis clubs or use the 26 miles of hiking and equestrian trails.

CLEVELAND – The Republican Party mistakenly invited an Ohio prison inmate to a $2,500-a-plate fund-raising dinner with President Bush.

The invitation, complete with a letter from Vice President Dick Cheney, was sent to Robert Kirkpatrick at the Belmont Correctional Institution in eastern Ohio.

The letter asked Kirkpatrick to “join the president and Mrs. Bush for a private dinner here in Washington, D.C.” on June 19.

Kirkpatrick, 35, was sentenced last year in Canton to nearly three years for drug possession and escape.

“I’m going to tell him that I’d be happy to attend, but he’s going to have to pull some strings to get me there,” Kirkpatrick said.

Spokesman Carl Forti of the National Republican Congressional Committee acknowledged Monday that the mailing was a mistake.

Let the good times flash

HAMLIN, W.Va. – For years, Lincoln County has had only one stoplight. Now it’s down to a single flashing signal.

The traffic light at an intersection featuring the county courthouse, a flower shop and a tanning salon was replaced by the flashing signal, and the change will be permanent if the state Division of Highways receives no strong objections within two months, the division’s Bruce Kenney said.

Sharrell Lovejoy, 80, remembers when the stoplight was built in the 1940s, just down the street from his Bobcat Diner.

“I think we still need it,” Lovejoy said.

Tractor-trailers and loaded log trucks were among the vehicles that hesitated at the new flashing signal Monday, uncertain which had the right of way.

“They’re just going to have a wreck there,” Joseph Melkus, 17, said during a walk downtown for a corn dog.

The new flashing light has prompted jokes among some residents.

“What are we going to do for entertainment?” said Loren Smith, an Alum Creek physician. “When people say, ’What do you do for fun?’, we tell ’em that sometimes after dinner on Sunday, we’ll take a carload of people down to the intersection and watch that thing go up and down.”

Rock on in Sin City

LAS VEGAS – High-rollers in Las Vegas can now enjoy a condo fit for the Rat Pack.

The Park Towers condominium, located right on the Strip, offers everything from an elegant piano bar to a spa.

“If you want a bottle of Opus (wine) at 2 a.m., you’re going to get it,” said Cindy DellaValle, Park Towers sales director. “It’s a Four Seasons lifestyle that’s very private.”

The condominium is one of a handful of new high-end places to live that have started to show up in Sin City.

“We are selling a lifestyle,” said Jeffrey Soffer, developer of the $600 million Turnberry Place.

What many perceived as a gamble — the first upscale high-rise community to be built in Las Vegas in nearly 30 years — is paying off. More than half the 740 units in the four-tower project have been sold, Soffer said.

In a city known for 99-cent shrimp cocktails and free drinks for gamblers, luxury doesn’t come cheap. The condos start at a half million dollars.

Jurors in the federal Earth First! versus FBI and Oakland Police Department case did not report a verdict Tuesday as many had expected.

Instead jurors in the controversial trial in which the prosecution says the FBI and OPD mishandled a 1990 car bombing investigation asked Judge Claudia Wilken questions, and for more time for deliberation. The jury started deliberations two weeks ago.

One hypothetical question jurors asked: What would happen if the jury was undecided about the defendant accused of framing and abusing the civil rights of environmental activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney.

Wilken told jurors that if a decision could not be made for a defendant, a new trial would determine that defendant’s fate. However, Wilken said, a decision of not guilty for one defendant would not result in a new trial.

To aid the jurors, Wilken allowed them to use a new verdict form that includes a check box for an undecided status next to the names of each defendant. After the jurors left Wilken emphasized that she wanted a verdict, not a hung jury.

Jurors on Tuesday presented their schedules to the judge. Deliberation time will run until Friday.

The jurors must decide whether or not the defendants violated the First Amendment rights of plaintiff Bari and Cherney through false arrest and unlawful search, and whether there was a conspiracy on the part of law enforcement to violate these rights.

The jury in the case faces a complex task requiring up to 167 separate unanimous decisions to decide all claims in favor of Bari and Cherney and award them damages.

Cherney and Bari were injured when a bomb exploded in their car while they were driving in Oakland in May 1990. Bari, who was at the wheel, suffered a crushed pelvis and Cherney received cuts from the blast.

The FBI and Oakland police maintain they conducted a thorough and reasonable investigation.

But two of the three Oakland police officers named in the suit filed by Cherney and Bari say they were heavily influenced by FBI agents who came to the scene of the 1990 bombing and told them the two victims were tied to domestic terrorism. FBI agents, meanwhile, maintain it was Oakland police who pushed for the swift arrests.

Lawyers for Earth First!, including lead counsel Dennis Cunningham, have said that the long deliberation period is a good sign. The jury could have decided very quickly to find the defendants not guilty but a guilty decision requires more time and effort, lawyers said.

According to J. Tony Serra, a member of the plaintiff’s legal team, 12 days is the longest jury deliberation he recalls among the estimated 800 jury trials in which he has taken part.

During the deliberation period jurors requested copies of the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution to clarify accusations of false arrest, unlawful search, and conspiracy to interfere with free speech made against the defendants.

Lawyers for the FBI and OPD objected to the jury’s request but Wilken overruled them.

Jurors also asked questions about probable cause for arrest, and whether the arrested parties should have been released. After hearing arguments from both sides, Wilken decided to tell the jurors to rely on written instructions already given.

At one point during the deliberation period the defendants’ lawyers tried to have the case thrown out, claiming that lawyers for Bari and Cherney illegally influenced the jury with remarks made while jurors were present outside the courthouse.

That cool confidence has taken the Berkeley High senior and accomplished performer and choreographer to the finals of the first annual Beach Blanket Babylon $10,000 Scholarship for the Arts.

Black was selected as one of three finalists in the dance portion of the Babylon competition after submitting a three-minute taped dance performaned to ‘You Are My Lucky Star.’

Eight other Bay Area high school seniors also made the cut and will compete live at Club Fugazi on June 10th for the scholarship.

One winner in each category — including dance, acting, and voice — will be presented a check for $10,000 for their college education. The competition is part of Beach Blanket Babylon’s first annual scholarship program dedicated to giving artistically gifted Bay Area high school seniors the opportunity to pursue a higher education.

According to Jo Schuman Silver, producer of Steve Silver’s Beach Blanket Babylon, the scholarship program hopes to give something back to the community. “Steve Silver always tried to help kids and give back to the community. This has been a dream of his,” said Schuman Silver.

For Black the competition will not be his first.

“I’ve always been into performing and dancing. Ever since I was a little kid I’ve wanted to make people laugh,” said Black.

Whether tap dancing on ‘Good Morning America,’ and ‘BayTV’ or choreographing dance shows at Berkeley High, Black says the stage is the place he wants to be.

“One of the things I love about performing is that once I’m on stage I feel like I’m on cruise control — I forget about being nervous, and I just enjoy it,” he added.

Though the talented senior has always been attracted to performing, finding a focus in dance has been the key to his success. Black credits the help of dance instructor Katie Maltsberger for her mentorship through the years.

“I definitely wouldn’t be in this competition if it wasn’t for her,” said Black.

Maltsberger, according to Black, has done much more than just share dance techniques at her El Cerrito studio. “We’ve built a relationship through the years and she’s let me know how to be in the business,” says Black.

Black also credits his parents for much of his success. “They’ve been nothing but supportive. I don’t think anyone knew what we were getting ourselves into with this competition, but they’ve always been there to drive me to auditions and to support me when I didn’t get an audition,” said Black.

Black says that growing up in the artistically diverse Bay Area also been an important part of his development as a performer.

The senior, who will attend the Conservatory of Dance at State University of New York at Purchase in the fall, lists Mikhail Baryshnikov as the one person he would most like to meet and also credits local performers Joanna Berman and Sascha Radetsky as significant influences.

Next Monday’s competition will include a performance by the cast of Beach Blanket Babylon, the internationally acclaimed musical revue, and also an appearance by San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Brown will introduce a film clip detailing the history of the musical before the nine finalists compete for the scholarship.

According to Schuman Silver, hundreds of entries were submitted for the competition. “It wasn’t an easy task to narrow down the field. We looked at every tape over and over and didn’t look at the high schools before we selected the finalists,” said Schuman Silver.

Schuman Silver says the show, in its 28th year, has become a San Francisco institution due to the talent and flare of the performers. “Steve created the most perfect show. It’s visually great, the performers are amazingly talented and the show is so topical,” said Schuman Silver. She says that most audience members return two or three times annually to watch the show.

Black, a fan of Beach Blanket Babylon, says that now that he’s finished with finals he’s ready to perform. “I got my projects out of the way already and I’m really just coasting right now,” said Black.

Though he’s been rehearsing a tap dance number called ‘The Hoofer’ for Monday’s competition 3 to 4 times per week lately, Black added that having fun is the most important part. “If I’m up their having fun, that’ll show during the competition,” says Black.

SAN FRANCISCO – An Afghan woman who suffered as a result of that country’s communist regime has received a scholarship to study law at a local university.

Nasrina Bargzie, 21, was chosen from a list of international applicants to receive the scholarship presented by the San Francisco Bar Association and Golden Gate University.

The Advancement of Afghan Women Scholarship was created last December to allow Afghan women who have been victimized by their native country’s government to study law at Golden Gate University.

Born in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Bargzie, along with her mother and three sisters, fled the country in 1979 after the Afghan government executed her father. She arrived in New Hampshire at the age of 5 and has lived in Concord since 1986.

Bargzie will study international law with an emphasis in human rights starting this fall.

“I would like to do something that would affect Afghanistan,” she said.

SAN JOSE – Apple Computer Inc. has resurrected the cathode-ray tube for the retail desktop market with a new computer that was originally intended only for schools.

Citing customer demand, on Tuesday Apple introduced an “eMac” model for consumers. It is similar to its education counterpart that was launched in April, featuring a 17-inch cathode ray tube monitor and 700 gigahertz G4 processor.

A half year ago, the Cupertino-based computer company declared that bulky CRT monitors were history when it introduced a new iMac with a flat-screen liquid-crystal display.

“We still think the flat panel is the future of our desktop line, but the costs of flat panels are still not as low as we’d like,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing.

In March, citing rising component costs, the company raised iMac prices by $100 — to a range of $1,399 to $1,899.

The eMac — priced at $999 and $1,199 — was a lower cost alternative for the education market, and consumers have since “pounded on the table demanding to buy the eMac,” Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said in a statement.

Also Tuesday, Apple released a public preview of the latest version of its streaming media software, QuickTime 6. The software features MPEG-4, one of the newest video-compression technologies.

PALO ALTO – The financial reporting system needs change, and auditors should not bear the entire burden of disasters such as the Enron debacle, according to the former chief executive of the embattled accounting firm Arthur Andersen.

In his first public appearance since his resignation from the accounting firm in March, Joseph Berardino was scheduled to speak late Tuesday before the Commonwealth Club in Palo Alto on how the Enron scandal forever will change accounting.

“The process of giving investors financial information to make decisions is broken,” he was expected to say, according to an early copy of the speech provided to The Associated Press.

“And all the change in the world won’t fix it if we continue to place the entire burden on the accounting profession.”

Berardino’s speech comes as the trial of Andersen nears an end in Houston. Federal prosecutors indicted the once-venerable accounting giant — whose business crumbled due to fallout from the collapse of former client Enron — on charges of obstructing justice by destroying documents. Andersen has pleaded innocent.

In his speech, Berardino, 52, does not speak specifically about Andersen, citing pending litigation.

But Berardino discusses unabashedly what he considers fundamental flaws in financial reporting. Among them: “Like the tax code, we’ve made accounting a game of rules, loopholes and legalisms.”

MOUNTAIN VIEW – Personal finance and small business software maker Intuit Inc. continued its expansion into new specialties Tuesday by announcing plans to acquire Management Reports Inc. for $92 million in cash.

Cleveland-based Management Reports designs software for the landlords of commercial and residential property. The company employs about 300 workers in 13 offices. Intuit said it expects to retain “virtually all” of Management Reports’ employees, including its chief executive officer, Bob Lasser.

The Management Reports deal, expected to be completed by July 31, is the latest of several recent acquisitions that Mountain View-based Intuit has made to diversify its business beyond its popular Quicken and TurboTax products.

Intuit expects Management Reports to boost its revenues by $40 million to $50 million during its next fiscal year beginning Aug. 1. The deal also should slightly increase Intuit’s earnings next year, the company said.

Intuit’s shares rose 40 cents Tuesday to close at $43.00 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

LOS ANGELES – The head of the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese will place full-page ads in three newspapers to reassure the public that he is doing all he can to prevent future abuse by priests.

Cardinal Roger Mahony has written an open letter that will appear Thursday in editions of the Los Angeles Times, the Daily News of Los Angeles and La Opinion.

“This is a trying time for all of us,” Mahony wrote. “An overwhelming sadness, along with a very real anger, accompanies the realization that people who serve the archdiocese have victimized all of us by betraying our trust.”

The cardinal’s newly hired public relations firm, Sitrick and Co., is behind the ad campaign, believing that the cardinal “had a good story to tell” readers, said Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

The archdiocese is trying to show that “we’re doing everything humanly possible to ensure that these situations do not occur again. Nothing from the past will be repeated again,” Tamberg said.

In the open letter, Mahony stresses many of the themes he has engaged in media interviews. Among them is a zero-tolerance policy, which requires the dismissal of priests who abuse children.

Mahony said he will urge bishops to adopt a national zero-tolerance policy next week at the U.S. Conference of Bishops in Dallas.

In the ad, Mahony vowed that three steps will be taken immediately when allegations are made about existing clergy sexually abusing a minor.

First, the proper authorities will be notified so an investigation can begin. Assistance will be offered to the person making the complaint and that person’s family, and the accused priest will immediately be removed from all active ministry.

“If the allegation is found to be true, I will never return that priest to any active ministry or pastoral office,” Mahony wrote.

He also notes in the ad that he is creating a clergy misconduct oversight board headed by a retired Superior Court judge. The cardinal is calling for fingerprinting and criminal background checks for all priesthood candidates in the archdiocese.

In addition, before ordination, candidates for the priesthood will go through an evaluation period of nearly a year, when they will live in a rectory and work with priests, staff members and parishioners.

SAN FRANCISCO – A U.S. Air Force colonel who called President Bush “a joke” and accused him of allowing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to happen because “his presidency was going nowhere,” has been suspended and could face a court-martial.

The letter from Lt. Col. Steve Butler, who was vice chancellor for student affairs at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, was published May 26 in The (Monterey County) Herald.

“He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism,” Butler wrote. “His daddy had Saddam and he needed Osama. His presidency was going nowhere. ... This guy is a joke.”

Butler, who called Bush’s alleged silence “sleazy and contemptible,” was suspended from his position on May 29 pending the outcome of an investigation into his remarks, Air Force spokeswoman Valerie Burkes said Tuesday. He remains assigned to the Defense Language Institute.

Butler, who entered active duty in April 1979, was a navigator during Desert Storm, Burkes said. His wife, Shelly, told The Herald that Butler plans to retire in a few weeks.

Military law specifically prohibits “contemptuous words against the president” and other political leaders.

The prohibition against anti-government speech goes back to 1776, when soldiers were forbidden from using “traitorous or disrespectful words.” The rules were updated several times and “traitorous or disrespectful” changed to “contemptuous.”

SACRAMENTO – A lawyer for a Sacramento landlady convicted of killing three of her tenants and burying them in the backyard claims there is no evidence the deaths were homicides and has asked a federal judge to release her from prison.

Attorney Marc Zilversmit argued in papers that Dorothea Puente, 72, whose yard and garden yielded seven buried bodies in 1988, should have been prosecuted for fraud or theft, not murder.

Puente was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison with no parole for killing three boarders at her Victorian house in 1987 and 1988. A jury could not resolve six other murder charges against her.

Puente has said she collected Social Security benefits owed to seven men and women whose deaths she never reported — and tried to hide.

In addition to the seven victims unearthed from the yard, Puente also was charged with killing a former roommate whose death was originally classified as “undetermined” and a former suitor who was found in a box on a riverbank.

Zilversmit describes all the “suspected murder victims” as “very old and sick after lifetimes of alcohol and drug abuse,” in papers filed in U.S. District Court.

Two of the men were in their early to mid-50s, one was 62 and three of the women were in their early 60s. Because of their advanced state of decomposition, coroners were not able to determine a precise cause of death.

Puente had a criminal record of drugging people to steal from them, and drugs were found in many of the remains excavated from her property

LIVERMORE – Michael R. Anastasio will lead the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, regents for the University of California announced Tuesday.

Anastasio, 53, currently is deputy director for strategic operations at Lawrence Livermore, and during his 22 years at the lab has been nationally recognized for his leadership in the design and safe stewardship of nuclear weapons. He will take office July 1, replacing C. Bruce Tarter.

Anastasio graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor’s degree in physics and earned his master’s degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he also earned his doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics.

He was the second person given the nod for the job by UC President Richard Atkinson. UC operates the laboratory, which has designed and developed such weaponry and technology as the U.S. Navy’s Polaris missile and speedy methods to identify salmonella.

Ray Juzaitis, who leads nuclear weapons research at the national laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., recently dropped out of the running for director after being tabbed by Atkinson, saying his unwarranted link to the Wen Ho Lee debacle would have made it difficult to lead the lab.

The Energy Department became concerned about Juzaitis’ perceived connection to Lee at the last minute, prompting UC to call off the announcement last month, according to university officials.

SACRAMENTO – Optimism was in short supply Tuesday as lawmakers delved into the grim task of carving $23.6 billion from the state budget.

“There is no question in my mind that the outcome will be unhappy to virtually everybody,” said Assemblywoman Jenny Oropeza, D-Long Beach, who sits on a six-member panel working on a 2002-03 budget compromise.

Tuesday marked the first day of intense marathon negotiations over Gov. Gray Davis’ election-year budget plan, which includes controversial proposals to raise car and cigarette taxes, cutting heavily from health care programs and borrowing from future revenues.

Wednesday, the panel plans to take up deep cuts to health care programs proposed by Davis including an expansion to parents of the state’s health insurance program for poor children.

The committee has less than two weeks to meet a seldom-observed constitutional deadline to reconcile the 400-page plan into a compromise that satisfies the state Senate, Assembly and Davis. Chairman Steve Peace, a Democratic Senator from El Cajon, said he intends to meet seven days a week if needed to meet the deadline.

The task will involve painstakingly dissecting many state programs one-by-one to cut, borrow, shift or even add money.

Eventually, the committee must tackle sticky issues including funding health care spending, paying for schools and ultimately how much, if at all, to raise taxes. But those issues are likely to come later in the process.

On Tuesday morning, the two-house Budget Conference Committee waded through an array of items ranging from doling out $6.7 million to the Department of Justice for anti-terrorism efforts to debating the pitfalls of funding local mandates.

SAN DIEGO – The trial of the man accused of killing 7-year-old Danielle van Dam opened Tuesday with prosecutors outlining new forensic evidence and the defense seeking to discredit the girl’s parents for giving false statements to police.

Deputy District Attorney Jeff Dusek told jurors that investigators found Danielle’s hair in the house and motor home of David Westerfield, the neighbor accused of kidnapping and killing her in February.

Dusek also disclosed that investigators collected fibers matching carpet in Danielle’s bedroom from inside Westerfield’s 35-foot motor home, where investigators also found the girl’s fingerprints and blood.

Danielle was discovered missing on Feb. 2, when her parents went to awaken her. An intense search of the region surrounding their suburban home ended Feb. 27 with the discovery of her nude body along a rural road east of San Diego.

“Somebody dumped her body like trash,” Dusek said. “The evidence will show you who that is.”

Westerfield, 50, is charged with kidnapping and murdering the second-grade girl who lived two doors away. He also is charged with misdemeanor possession of child pornography. He has pleaded innocent and could face the death penalty if convicted.

Defense attorney Steven Feldman said the evidence would vindicate his client.

CHICAGO – One of the world’s leading medical journals has put itself and its competitors under the microscope with research showing that published studies are sometimes misleading and frequently fail to mention weaknesses.

Some problems can be traced to biases and conflicts of interest among peer reviewers, who are outside scientists tapped by journal editors to help decide whether a research paper should be published, according to several articles in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

Other problems originate in news releases some journals prepare to call attention to what they believe are newsworthy studies. The releases do not routinely mention study limitations or industry funding and may exaggerate the importance of findings, according to one JAMA study.

Wednesday’s JAMA, devoted entirely to such issues, “is our attempt to police ourselves, to question ourselves and to look at better ways to make sure that we’re honest and straightforward and maintain the integrity of the journals,” said Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA’s editor.

The articles “underscore that the findings presented in the press and medical journals are not always facts or as certain as they seem,” said Rob Logan, director of the Science Journalism Center at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

DeAngelis said problems are most likely to occur in research funded by drug companies, which have a vested interest in findings that make their products look good.

Many top journals require researchers to disclose any ties to drug companies, and Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said editors rely on researchers to be truthful.

“I imagine that from time to time we screw up” and fail to adequately mention drug company ties, but that is infrequent, Drazen said.

One JAMA report found that medical journal studies on new treatments often use only the most favorable statistic in reporting results, said author Dr. Jim Nuovo of the University of California at Davis.

His study reviewed 359 studies published between 1989 and 1998 in JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the British Medical Journal and Annals of Internal Medicine. Only 26 studies reported straightforward statistics that clearly assessed the effect on patients.

Most reported only the “relative risk reduction” linked to a specific treatment, which is the percentage difference between drug-treated patients and those in a placebo group. That figure is more misleading than the “absolute risk reduction,” which measures the actual difference between the treatment results compared with the placebo group, Nuovo said.

For example, if 5.1 percent of placebo-treated patients had heart attacks compared with 3.7 percent of drug patients, the absolute risk reduction in the drug group would be 1.4 percent. But researchers could use the relative risk reduction to claim that the drug lowers the risk of a heart attack 34 percent — which sounds a lot more impressive.

CANON CITY, Colo. – Dozens of families headed back into the charred foothills Tuesday to search for remnants of their lives after a 4,400-acre wildfire destroyed more than 80 homes.

Fire officials began allowing the residents into the area after cooler weather and scattered rain helped slow the fire.

“They need to get back home. They need to have closure,” Fremont County Sheriff Ivan Middlemiss said.

He warned the residents to prepare themselves emotionally, telling them: “This is not going to be the same area in your lifetime or my lifetime as when you left Sunday.”

Some homeowners braced for the worst.

“In bed last night, I was laying there thinking maybe it’s still there,” said Jan Freeman, who left her wedding ring behind in her haste to evacuate after the fire broke out Sunday.

She and her husband, Cecil Freeman, were told by acquaintances that their two-story home with a view of Pikes Peak and grazing elk was gone, along with at least 82 others. They said they plan to rebuild.

Hundreds of families were evacuated when the fire broke out in dry timber and brush west about 110 miles southwest of Denver. Besides the homes, the blaze destroyed a general store and several other structures. Royal Gorge Park closed temporarily but reopened Tuesday.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A federal judge on Tuesday acquitted Mayor Vincent Cianci Jr. on five of 17 corruption charges, but left intact more serious allegations that he headed a criminal empire run out of City Hall.

U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres, ruling in midtrial, said prosecutors failed to prove Cianci extorted bribes from tow truck operators or urged a witness to lie to the FBI.

Cianci still faces some key charges, including two counts of racketeering.

The judge also acquitted former top mayoral aide Frank Corrente of taking bribes to get a man a job on the police force, and urging an official to lie to the FBI about a suspicious lease deal.

Edward Voccola, a convicted felon and businessman, had both federal racketeering charges against him dismissed. Businessman Richard Autiello, did not have any of the seven charges against him dropped.

The acquittals let stand other counts against the three remaining defendants, including racketeering and charges they extorted bribes for jobs, tax cuts and deals.

Torres issued his ruling with the jury out of the courtroom. It came seven weeks into the trial.

SAN JOSE – A comeback attempt by the financially troubled San Jose Symphony has failed, forcing the 123-year-old orchestra to fall silent for up to a year and a half and almost certainly file for bankruptcy, the organization announced Tuesday.

The symphony’s final performance is scheduled for Saturday, the last of four benefit concerts the orchestra had hoped would help fund its recovery. After that, the nation’s 11th-largest city will be the biggest without a working orchestra.

“It’s probably not shocking to some who have watched this unfold for a few months, but it’s still sad nonetheless,” said Les White, the symphony’s interim chief operating officer.

While the symphony’s leaders have not officially decided to seek bankruptcy protection, White acknowledged the step appears inevitable.

The symphony has debts of more than $3 million and only the barest of assets — its sheet music, its acoustic shell and its office equipment, which even by liberal estimates are worth $300,000, White said. There is no endowment to speak of, he added.

Believed to be the oldest orchestra west of the Mississippi, the San Jose Symphony struggled for years to keep expenses down and raise money, and saw subscriptions and attendance decline over the past decade.

In October, the symphony canceled the 2001-2002 season, fired its office staff, dissolved its board and tried to craft a leaner administration and a shorter schedule. Former San Jose Mercury News publisher Jay Harris was hired to lead the transition.

There were small signs of progress. The union for the symphony’s 89 musicians agreed to forgo $2.5 million they were owed for rehearsals and performances that were canceled, and agreed to play the four benefit concerts to fund future operations.

The Alameda County District Attorney has offered to drop charges against the 78 pro-Palestinian activists who occupied UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall April 9, the Planet has learned.

“I think it’s a real vindication,” said Linda Sherif, a member of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and lawyer for the protesters. “It was a peaceful political demonstration and charges shouldn’t have been filed in the first place.”

“It just seemed fair given what was involved and their records and the message they were trying to send,” said, Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Stuart Hing, about the offer.

The defendants could accept the offer as early as Friday, during a court appearance at the Oakland branch of the Alameda County Superior Court.

All 78 defendants currently face charges of obstructing or intimidating an employee of a public agency.

The District Attorney has offered to drop all charges and issue an official “factual finding of innocence” for each defendant, requiring that all arrest records are sealed.

“I’m pleased with the offer that’s been made,” said defendants’ attorney Seth Chazin.

Chazin said lawyers have not yet contacted all the activists to confirm their acceptance of the District Attorney’s offer. But Hoang Phan, a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus group that spearheaded the April 9 takeover, said the defendants will likely agree to the proposal.

If they accept the offer, most defendants will have to pay court fees of $25 or $50, with Hernandez shelling out $750. Chazin said the fees are simply administrative payments. But Hing said the fees qualify as fines.

Activists took over Wheeler Hall April 9 after a full day of protest, calling on the University of California to divest from Israel. Protesters chanted slogans for hours before UC Berkeley police ordered them to leave. When the activists refused to disperse, campus police arrested them one-by-one, dragging some of them away.

After arraignment at the Berkeley branch of the Superior Court April 30, Judge Carol Brosnahan transferred the case to Oakland. The District Attorney’s Oakland office offered to drop the charges after a May 29 court date, according to Sherif.

“It’s a really big legal victory,” said Phan, the SJP leader. “It’s also a really big political victory.”

But Phan noted that the 41 students involved in the occupation still face possible disciplinary action, including suspension, from the university.

“We’ve won the criminal charges, but the student conduct charges we take very seriously,” he said, noting that SJP will fight any disciplinary action.

UC Berkeley spokeswoman Janet Gilmore said the university will send letters to the students this week notifying them of the charges they will face. She said it will then be up to the students to settle the matter in an informal meeting with staff or go to a hearing.

Gilmore declined to comment on the offer to drop criminal charges until receiving direct confirmation of that offer from the District Attorney.

City Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who has been a vocal critic of the university and supporter of the students, said he was not surprised by the District Attorney’s offer.

“I’ve been expecting it, because when you look at the police report, it is virtually unimaginable that they could be convicted,” said Worthington. “Any fair-minded District Attorney would probably come to the conclusion it’s not worth the enormous expense and staff time (to prosecute).”

LEE, Maine – With a dozen rolls of duct tape and more than 20 hours of creative hard work, Spencer Stacey and Samantha Braziller were outfitted for the Lee Academy senior prom.

The pair’s home-tailored formal wear for the dance was made entirely from the heavy-duty tape often found in toolboxes and utility drawers.

Stacey, a senior, had a three-piece black tuxedo with tails and a top hat, all trimmed in shiny silver. Every detail, down to the silver bow tie and red rose boutonniere, was made of duct tape.

Braziller, a junior, chose a long, white gown with swirling lines of silvery, sequinlike details that could pass for satin from a distance.

They estimate the cost at $75.

Braziller figures her duct tape dress should really come in handy if it rains at the dance.

“Everyone will be complaining and I can wipe the water right off,” she said.

Show and tell

MODESTO – A man landed in jail after his grandchildren showed up at school with $1,100 in counterfeit bills their grandfather had allegedly made.

School officials called police after a 7-year-old girl showed a handful of $100 bills to classmates, Stanislaus County sheriff’s spokesman Tom Letras said.

The second grader and her 5-year-old brother told police they took only a few $100 bills from the pile stored in grandpa’s van.

Police said they found Jose Luis Landeras on Tuesday stuffing moneymaking material down his pants.

Landeras, 42, was arrested on suspicion of making counterfeit money and spending it over the past seven months. Police said they confiscated $2,000 in phony bills.

The boy originally didn’t want to talk to police because he thought he and his sister were in trouble for stealing. Police coaxed him into telling them about the money when they asked what games he and his grandfather liked to play.

The boy said his favorite game was Frogger. And his grandpa’s? The “moneymaking game.”

Freeze!

RICHMOND, British Columbia – A Vancouver-area man had his early morning speed skating training session interrupted by a very cold naked man.

The Richmond man said his 2 a.m. speed skating session at the Richmond Ice Centre was interrupted when he noticed a man in the buff approaching him on the ice, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The nameless nude made an unsuccessful attempt to tackle the speed skater before fleeing the scene.

The skater was “obviously stunned, but was able to deal with the situation,” said RCMP spokesman Constable Peter Thiessen. Police did not catch the would-be attacker.

Affordable Housing Week is a chance to highlight the significant shortage of affordable housing in the Bay Area as well as celebrate the significant contributions of affordable housing to the lives of those who depend on it. Throughout my years as an assemblywoman, I have seen this area's affordable housing crisis worsen. The number of housing units available to families with low to moderate incomes is negligible compared to the rising number of those in need.

We must make significant progress to reduce the disparity between those who can and cannot afford housing. Our state is second to last in the nation in homeownership rates. A minimum-wage earner must work over 100 hours a week to be able to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the Bay Area. California has lost over 20,000 affordable housing units over the past five years, and there are over 360,000 homeless in California with the most rapidly growing segments of this population being seniors and families with children.

However, California has made significant strides in providing more affordable housing. We are exploring new and creative incentives to encourage developers to construct affordable housing, government is putting more funds towards constructing affordable housing and we are seeing better public policy around creating more affordable housing for California's families. I have supported the efforts of my colleagues in the State Legislature to ease the growing disparity between those who have housing and those who do not. Most notably, Senator John Burton's (D-San Francisco) $2.1 billion housing bond, if passed this November, will go far in addressing the affordable housing needs of this state. I fought to include close to $190 million for supportive housing, housing with built-in medical and social services assistance, and $15 million to fund housing for low-income UC and CSU students and staff. Affordable housing trusts, which already exist in a number of cities and counties throughout the state, are another example of what we can do to spur the construction of affordable housing units. These trusts are pools of money from various sources set aside for affordable housing. Affordable housing trusts must continue to be developed and supported.

On May 29th, the State Assembly adopted my ACR 209, a resolution calling upon Californians to participate in Affordable Housing Week activities and work towards diminishing our state's housing gap. Affordable Housing Week is being celebrated between June 1st and June 9th and will be marked by grand openings of affordable housing developments, forums on increasing affordable housing, and rallies throughout the state. This is a chance for people to come together in observance of the progress made around affordable housing as well connect more families with affordable housing, particularly the most vulnerable members of our community - low-income families, seniors and people with disabilities.

As California is faced with one of the most ominous budgets in recent history, it is incumbent upon all of us to come up with solutions with fewer resources, yet with greater resolve than ever before. Your participation in Affordable Housing Week is critical. It is an opportunity for all of us to be advocates, it is a call to leadership, a challenge that must be met on behalf of those who struggle daily to meet a need which most of us take for granted.

Your efforts will be felt by thousands of families in your community. Your work can create rooftops!

LOS ANGELES – This might be a tough encore for the Los Angeles Lakers.

After winning one of the most riveting series in playoff history, they still need four wins over the New Jersey Nets to earn their third straight title and a spot in the record books for their coach.

But if ever the NBA Finals could possibly be considered an afterthought, it’s now.

After all, the Lakers are 9-1 favorites over the upstart Nets after beating the Sacramento Kings in a series many believe determined the championship.

One problem could be a letdown, at least early in the best-of-seven series. The Lakers were indeed tested by the Kings in the Western Conference finals and were left with little time to gear up for the Nets.

“Deep, deeper than we’ve ever dug before,” Derek Fisher said after his team’s 112-106 overtime victory in Game 7 at Sacramento.

“I would say that it was grueling,” Shaquille O’Neal said.

The Lakers, who took Monday off to rest, were to practice Tuesday in nearby El Segundo.

Game 1 is Wednesday night at Staples Center. Game 2 also will be in Los Angeles on Friday before the series shifts to New Jersey for Games 3, 4 and, if necessary, 5.

The Lakers are making their 21st appearance in the NBA Finals and will be shooting for their 14th championship, including five in Minneapolis before moving to Los Angeles in 1960.

The Nets, in the playoffs for the first time since 1998, will be playing in the finals for the first time. Their 10 playoff wins this spring are one more than their total since joining the NBA in 1976.

“They have a nice little team,” Robert Horry said.

“They play with a lot of emotion, they play with a lot of moxie,” Lakers coach Phil Jackson said. “We felt confident that the winner of this conference would win the series and we still believe it.”

Confidence is never a problem for the Lakers. Even when they trailed the Kings 3-2 they were upbeat — from Jackson to the end of the bench.

The Lakers’ fans even include some Nets.

“I was rooting for the Lakers to pull it out because I wanted to go home and play them,” said Lucious Harris, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended Long Beach State. “It’s unbelievable to be going home and playing the champions.”

“First we beat Boston in Boston, now I’m going home to play LA in the NBA Finals,” he said. “I couldn’t have scripted it better.”

The Lakers have appeared vulnerable at times during the playoffs, but now they are playing their best basketball of the postseason.

“We still have the heart of a champion,” forward Rick Fox said.

One of the main reasons the Lakers beat the Kings was O’Neal’s ability to ignore the pain from his arthritic right big toe and produce dominating efforts in Games 6 and 7.

He had 41 points and 17 rebounds Friday night in a 106-102 victory and 35 points and 13 rebounds less than 48 hours later in Game 7.

And he made free throws: 13-of-17 and 11-of-15 in the last two games. That’s 24-of-32 and 75 percent — far above his typical output.

“Over the last couple of years now, when I’ve needed to hit them, I’ve hit them,” he said.

Jackson has won a record 23 straight playoff series. If he makes it 24, he will have nine championships as a coach to tie Red Auerbach’s record and 156 postseason victories, one more than leader Pat Riley.

New Jersey’s Byron Scott, meanwhile, is in his second year as an NBA head coach — both with the Nets, who were 26-56 in his first season.

Scott played 11 of his 14 NBA seasons with the Lakers and was a starter on three of their five championship teams in the 1980s.

“It’s one of the greatest organizations in all of sports,” he said. “I loved being there, playing there and now going back there as a coach.

“I love this challenge. I’m going back to LA to coach in the NBA Finals. It’s a dream come true for me.”

Several gun shots were fired at the driver of a car parked on the 1500 block of Alcatraz Avenue early Sunday morning, according to the Berkeley Police Department.

The victim was taken to Highland Hospital after the 1:30 a.m. shooting where he was treated for multiple gunshot wounds to the shoulder and has since been released.

According to BPD public information officer Lt. Cynthia Harris, the suspect in the shooting has been identified but remains at large. Police are withholding the name until Tuesday. Three other individuals were in the car during the shooting and were not injured.

BPD squad cars appeared on scene in the south Berkeley neighborhood approximately 30 seconds after a report of loud noises in the area. According to Harris, the car involved in the incident sped from Alcatraz Avenue to Fairview Street, two blocks north, before being stopped by police.

More than a dozen BPD squad cars followed within minutes of the shooting along with both an ambulance and truck from Berkeley Fire Department.

A BPD squad car was also seen speeding east on Fairview Street moments after the shooting.

According to Lt. Harris, no indication of a motive has been released. Harris did not comment as to whether or not the victim in the shooting knew the suspect.

The shooting follows a series of community meetings between the BPD and residents concerned about increased violence and drug activity specifically in south and west Berkeley. The BPD released details last Thursday of the arrest of 20 individuals suspected of illegal drug trafficking.

Sunday’s shooting is the most recent in a pattern of violence in the south Berkeley area. On January 22, Oakland residents Rammar Johnson and Noel Turner, Jr., were shot in the head while sitting in their car on 64th Street. The two later died as a result of their injuries. The perpetrator in that shooting is still at large.

Berkeley resident Dwight Leeray and 25-year old Raymond Smith also died as the result of violent crimes in south Berkeley, in unrelated incidents, in March. Two suspects are behind bars for the death of Leeray.

According to the BPD, patrols in south Berkeley have increased as a result of the recent homicides and other violence. Officers emphasize that residents must work with the police to reduce crime.

Officers urge community members to call the BPD with any information at 981-5900 and also provide an anonymous tip line 843-2677 (THE-COPS).

Considering Mr. Worthington’s promotion of speed limits in Berkeley, I don’t dispute his observation that no other big city is doing this because it violates the California vehicle code (25 mph on residential streets but 15 mph near schools). But Berkeley is known for flaunting traffic laws. About 20 years ago, street barriers were installed which removed traffic from streets inhabited by “preferred” citizens, causing traffic jams and waste of fuel. Property values in the protected streets, including that of the subsequent “liberal” mayor and her husband, went up considerably.

This scheme was clearly against provisions of the vehicle code and was instituted by an unholy alliance of the “centrist” Mayor Dean, who wanted to protect North Berkeley streets of political supporters and “liberal” City Counsel member Hancock, who wanted to close down traffic in the South campus area. The majority of citizens against this scheme had no political support.

A popular lawsuit against the city took three years and the city lost the case in all instances, including the California Supreme Court, which ordered the barriers to be “removed forthwith.” But the city stonewalled the court decision until, three months later, a fly-by-night legal maneuver by Ms. Hancock’s husband, the venerable Tom Bates, managed to legalize the barriers ex-post-facto by promoting a slight technical change of the vehicle code in the Legislature.

Many current Berkeley residents were not here then and they don’t know about these shenanigans that are well remembered by a refugee to Albany.

“Misha” seemed ageless in his appearance with the White Oak Dance Project at Zellerbach Hall last weekend – not that time hasn’t altered the golden glow of his youth to a mellower shade. His dancing isn’t as breathtaking as it once was, but it’s wiser, humbler, deeper.

Baryshnikov is no longer showing off. He’s showing up, to tell us, with the authority of a master, what he’s learned.

And that’s a lot. One thing he has learned is to be a thorough team player. He and Mark Morris co-founded the White Oak Project twelve years ago to showcase modern dancers and modern dance choreographers. They meant it to be a collaboration, and among the company of eight at Cal Performances, Baryshnikov displayed a winning grace in blending with his co-performers.

It was dance, not the dancers, that mattered.

Of course Baryshnikov had star moments; we’d be disappointed if he didn’t. The first was a bracing solo in Lucinda Childs’ “Largo.” If modern dance ranges from more “classical” modes to off-the-wall, Childs is a classicist, serving up relaxed but meticulously designed fare. An elegant exploration of space set to a lush interpretation of Corelli, “Largo” sent its protagonist on a journey of thoughtful turns and deliberately reaching arms, punctuated by stirring stillnesses as he girded himself to set out time and again.

The work might be an emblem for Baryshnikov. In easygoing black jacket and loose Gene Kelly-ish pants, he offered exhilarating proof of undiminished grace.

Next came Eric Hawkins classic 1961 “Early Floating,” in which a trio of men and a woman (Baryshnikov, Zane Booker, Roger Jeffrey, Emily Coates) make their moves under a colorful Calder-like stabile whose angles seem to be.

relationships that are coolly self-possessed yet amusingly fresh, and if modern dance pioneer Hawkins, who died in 1994, was looking down, he was surely pleased at the homage.

But how to describe what came next? Sarah Michelson’s “The Experts” tried so hard to be off the wall that it ended up falling flat. Performed on a giant sheet of bubble-wrap, its goofy moves were punctuated by a constant popping crackle, while a racecar kept whining overhead. The costumes were from cuckoo-land: one dancer in pedal pushers, another in butterfly wings, a third in a gauzy skirt, a fourth in a jock strap, a fifth looking like a bad-taste Bo Peep. Why? The music featured twittering birds, while the motley tribe on stage wiggled motorized hips and uttered longing cries. In one sequence their flopping arms attempted flight, but the poor things never come near getting off the ground.

Fortunately the concluding work, Lucinda Child’s “Chacony,” got off the ground nicely, thank you. Six dancers – Miguel Anaya, Emily Coates, Jennifer Howard, Roger Jeffrey, Sonja Kostich and Rosalynde LeBlanc – held the stage for a quarter of an hour to a prickly Benjamin Britten score. They were a sextet of busily striding pedestrians who turned self-possessed into a cool transcendence as they peeled off from the crowd and turned and mingled in serene yet spirited combinations.

At the end they left the stage to Baryshnikov, who performed a touching coda that featured tentative leaps, as if he’d lost his way. Not a chance, though.

Last month’s Bay Area dance news may have been prima ballerina Joanna Berman’s retirement in her mid-thirties, but Baryshnikov spells out a different story. In his fifties he’s still going strong, and it’s a gift to watch him show us how dance is done.

“I am going to sleep like Tony Gwynn, like a baby. I’ve been like Shawon Dunston — tossing and turning all over the place.”

By going 3-for-6, with his first homer of the season and two doubles, Benard raised his average from .229 to .250. Dunston is hitting .135.

Benard, who had started just nine games previously this year, got a half-hour’s notice from manager Dusty Baker that he was starting in right field and batting leadoff in place of Reggie Sanders, who had a bruised right middle finger.

“When you don’t play every day, and all of a sudden you get a chance to start, and you know you’re starting that game, you start thinking about things,” Benard said. “And you get yourself in trouble because you overthink.

“When things happened like they did today, there was no time to think. There was just time to go out there and react, which we should be doing all the time anyway, but it’s easier said than done.”

Benito Santiago also hit a three-run homer for the Giants, who had a season-high 20 hits. After losing four games in which they scored a total of just five runs, the Giants have scored 20 runs in two games.

Santiago’s homer highlighted a six-run third inning. Tsuyoshi Shinjo homered leading off the five-run eighth, and Benard went deep three batters later. Jeff Kent added an RBI double to finish 3-for-5 with three RBIs.

The Giants batted around in the third and eighth innings.

Every Giants starter had at least one hit and one run scored. Starting pitcher Russ Ortiz (5-4) had two hits and scored once while holding the Padres to three runs and five hits in six innings.

The Padres kept Barry Bonds in the ballpark, but he walked and scored in the third. Bonds, who hit his 586th homer Sunday night to tie Frank Robinson for fourth on the career list, was 2-for-3 with two walks.

The Padres have lost five straight and 14 of 18. They were coming off a weekend sweep by Milwaukee, which has the second-worst record in the majors.

A federal jury has reached verdicts on six of the seven FBI and Oakland police officers accused of framing and violating the civil rights of environmental activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in the controversial 1990 car bombing, according to Earth First! officials.

Lawyers for both parties are expected to meet with U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken to discuss jury deliberations at 8 a.m. on Tuesday in the Oakland Federal Building.

It was not known at press time whether or not verdicts would be read following the morning’s scheduled meeting.

“Every time I’ve been pitching it’s been a tight game,” he said. “I have to keep the game close and wait for us to score some runs.”

Garcia kept it close Monday night, winning his third straight start as the Seattle Mariners held off the Oakland Athletics 4-1.

Garcia (7-4) did not allow a run until the eighth inning, when John Mabry hit a solo home run with one out. The last five runs that Garcia has allowed have been solo homers.

It was the first Oakland homer for Mabry, who came to the A’s on May 22 in the trade that sent Jeremy Giambi to Philadelphia.

Garcia allowed the one run on five hits over 7 2-3 innings. He struck out five.

“He’s just really good,” teammate Jeff Cirillo said. “When the weather warms up so will Freddy. I don’t think he’s pitched his best baseball.”

Kazuhiro Sasaki pitched the ninth for his 13th save.

The loss, in the first game of a four-game set between the AL West rivals, snapped the resurgent A’s three-game winning streak.

A’s rookie right-hander Aaron Harang (1-1) wasn’t as sharp as he was in his major league debut May 25, when he combined with reliever Chad Bradford on a three-hit shutout against Tampa Bay.

Harang allowed three runs on five hits over six innings. He struck out five.

“I wish things had turned out the other way around,” Harang said. “Garcia was just on tonight. You can’t do anything about that.”

With the game scoreless in the fifth, the Mariners loaded the bases with no outs. Cirillo hit a sacrifice fly, the first run allowed by Harang, and Mark McLemore added an RBI single to make it 2-0.

The 11 scoreless innings to start his career surpassed the Oakland record of 10, set by John Henry Johnson when he started out in 1978.

“He pitched well enough to win on a lot of occasions, but not tonight,” A’s manager Art Howe said. “He ran up against a tough customer.”

Ruben Sierra’s grounder in the sixth scored John Olerud, who doubled and went to third on a passed ball. Mike Cameron added an RBI double in the seventh.

Miguel Tejada’s single in the first inning extended his hitting streak to 13 games.

Seattle’s Ichiro Suzuki extended his hitting streak to 12 games with a single in the seventh.

Notes: The last 12 homers that Garcia has allowed have been solo shots. ... Last year the Mariners took the season series against the Athletics 10-9, but Oakland was the only team to beat Seattle more than five times.

East Bay resident Anne Finger has had a hard time buying personal hygiene products at her local drugstore lately, and blames plastic blue storage bins that are stacked in the aisles, keeping her from reaching the retail shelves.

While some might be inclined to move the bulky bins, Finger, 50, has a physical disability which requires her to use a wheelchair and limits her ability.

The Berkeley-based Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Inc. has joined Finger in filing a lawsuit against drugstore giant Walgreen Co., alleging that the retailer routinely blocks access to aisles and goods and thus fails to comply with California law requiring full and equal access to customers.

One of the two East Bay stores cited in the suit is the Berkeley Walgreens at 2995 San Pablo Ave. The other store is at 5055 Telegraph Ave. in Oakland.

Finger said that her inability to access goods at the two stores is not intermittent, but chronic and that she’s raised the issue with store managers four or five times now.

“They say the right things, but the next time you come in, it’s the same way,” she said. “They seem to have a policy of using the aisles for storage.”

A lack of response from management prompted Finger to file the May 22 suit which could force Walgreens to make policy changes as well as award Finger a monetary sum. The suit was filed in Alameda County Superior Court.

Ilinois-based Walgreens declined to comment on pending lawsuits and did not return phone calls requesting information about their access protocols. The retailer has one month to issue a legal response to the May filing.

The nonprofit DREDF, which has also filed recent disability suits against corporations Chevron and Amtrak, says a lawsuit is its last-resort in seeking compliance from the company that has not addressed its complaints.

“Our main goal in this suit is a policy change in the inventory management practices of Walgreens,” said DREDF attorney Linda Kilb.

Kilb was optimistic that Walgreens would assent to the needs of the disabled.

“We’re not talking about them having to rebuild things... Their architectural design is fine. We’re talking about them taking a different approach [to stocking merchandise],” she said, noting that the latter was a much less costly prospect.

Despite access issues, Finger continues to shop at the two Walgreens stores near her home, about twice a month she says.

“Being discriminated against doesn’t make me want to go away. It makes me want to try harder,” she said.

Thousands of low-income Berkeley residents eligible for a 40 percent reduction in their electricity bills may not be taking advantage of the opportunity.

Pacific Gas & Electric released statistics Monday showing that only 52 percent of Alameda County customers eligible for state-mandated reductions through the California Alternate Rate for Energy, or CARE, are taking part in the program.

“We need to do more,” said PG&E spokesman Jason Alderman, noting that by comparison 78 percent of eligible Santa Clara County customers are enrolled in CARE.

Statewide, according to PG&E figures, 600,000 customers have signed up, but another 400,000 who are eligible are not enrolled.

Alderman said PG&E has not compiled Berkeley-specific figures, but he noted that there are about 40,000 customers in the city and roughly 10 percent are eligible for CARE. If the overall statistics for Alameda County hold true in Berkeley, some 2,000 eligible customers may not be enrolled.

PG&E representatives and members of local community groups fanned out to Bay Area company offices Monday to sign up customers, who typically show up in large numbers on the first Monday of a new month.

Georgina Aguila of the Spanish Speaking Unity Council, an Oakland advocacy group, was on hand to help with enrollments.

She said her group can help get the word out to members of the local Latino community who may be uninformed or scared to enroll.

“They’re afraid to apply,” said Aguila, noting that once they do, they can realize substantial savings.

Alderman said the Unity Council is one of several community groups PG&E taps to get out the word about CARE. He said summer is a good time to enroll since people often make heavier use of air conditioners and electricity bills rise.

New income requirements, set at 175 percent of the federal poverty line, went into effect yesterday making thousands more eligible statewide.

Last year for example, a family of four making $31,100 or less was eligible for CARE. As of Monday, that figure is set at $32,000 or less.

Plans for deeming the corner of San Pablo and University Avenues as an International Marketplace may soon become a reality.

The marketplace campaign, supported by both city officials and local store and restaurant owners, hopes to promote awareness among the unique and ethnically diverse restaurants near and around the intersection.

According to Mayor Shirley Dean the large concentration of Indian and Hispanic restaurants and stores makes the spot ideal for the international food district designation. In addition there are places that sell Thai, Spanish, French, Chinese and Pakistani foods.

“I would really like to see it happen. People want an experience when they shop and dine. This would give them that experience, a taste of different things. That’s always been one of Berkeley’s strong points,” Dean said.

According to Dean the city hopes to facilitate the growth of the district by producing brochures detailing the unique foods and spices at each restaurant, hanging banners in the area and placing maps of the district throughout Berkeley.

With 11 unique and diverse restaurants within a block of each other, the intersection of University and San Pablo Avenues is a great location for an International Marketplace, Khanna said.

City officials, local merchants and the UAA have gathered recently at a series of meeting to discuss Ideas for the Marketplace campaign.

“At first not too many people attended the meetings, they thought we were just wasting our time. But as we go, our attendance is getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Khanna said.

According to Khanna, the International Marketplace would include businesses and restaurants as far north as Hearst Avenue, south to Allston Way and east to either 9th or 10th Street.

“Once it gets going it’s going to be as popular as places like Jack London Square and the 4th Street area. We want to bring an awareness to the populous. We want people to try us out. We want people, when they ask where they’re going to eat in Berkeley to think of us,” said Khanna.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea. We need to have a focus in this part of town. Each business here is unique, each one has it’s own specialty,” said Jorge Pena, owner of Pena’s Bakery on San Pablo Avenue.

Mexican pastries and deserts, including flan and tres leches, a pound cake-like-mix made from three types of milk, set the bakery apart according to Pena.

“Other places sell some of the pastries but we’re the only ones to make them from scratch,” Pena said.

The campaign hopes to create greater advertising strength for the area by combining the efforts of the businesses which otherwise would not

According to Steve Winston, owner of the Spanish Tables, a specialty store selling food and wine from Spain and Portugal, the area was a good fit when he opened in September.

“I’m really excited about what’s going on. We want this to be an ethnic food shopping area,” said Winston.

According to Winston the Spanish Tables attracts customers from all over the Bay Area and is a compliment to both the New World Spanish food and other specialty restaurants and stores in the area.

SEATTLE – A consumer-rights lawyer is seeking $1 billion in damages from some of the nation’s largest power companies, claiming they made billions from artificially created power shortages during last year’s power crunch.

Class-action status is sought for the lawsuit, filed Monday in San Francisco Superior Court by Seattle lawyer Steve Berman. He seeks to represent hundreds of thousands of ratepayers in 21 of Washington’s 28 public utility districts.

In a statement, Berman said his was the first legal action seeking damages for affected ratepayers outside California. California’s lieutenant governor and attorney general previously filed similar, separate lawsuits on behalf of California ratepayers.

Berman’s lawsuit asks the court to force the defendants, who so far number 13, to return profits “wrongfully amassed” since January 2001 and make restitution to the ratepayers.

“In our opinion, the fix was in, and Washington electric ratepayers were set up to be the losers,” Berman said.

According to the complaint, the defendants own or control 19 gas-fired power-generating plants in California and conspired to create a cartel to withhold power from the market, creating artificial shortages and causing price spikes. It also contends the defendants engaged in transactions designed to inflate the cost of electricity.

The impact was crippling on PUDs in the Northwest that were forced to buy power on the spot market, Berman said.

“Most of the PUDs tried to absorb the rate increases the defendants engineered, but simply ran out of money,” he said. “They had no choice but to go to the ratepayers with higher rates” while the power brokers posted “obscenely huge profits.”

SACRAMENTO – A herd of 3,000 dairy cattle in Tulare County has been quarantined and 56 cows have been killed after a federal meat inspector found traces of bovine tuberculosis.

The disease was suspected four weeks ago when an inspector noticed suspicious lesions on beef in a Hanford meat packing plant, Steve Lyle, spokesman for the California Department of Food and Agriculture said Monday.

A test confirmed the disease and the Holstein cow was traced to the Tulare dairy. Further tests found dozens of cows were exposed to the disease.

“We have 89 cattle that have tested positive for exposure. That’s a lot,” Lyle said.

Lyle said 56 cows were killed Friday and 33 were scheduled to be killed Tuesday.

Lyle refused to name the farm where the outbreak occurred, citing biosecurity concerns. He said farm employees and the milk processor that buys milk from the dairy have been notified.

Under the quarantine, no cow can be moved from the farm until it is tested as free of the disease, Lyle said.

Bovine TB is a deadly lung disease that has been found in Michigan and Texas and is commonly found in Mexico. The last known case in the state was in 1991.

People can contract the disease by working closely with infected cows or by drinking raw milk or eating uncooked meat from infected cows. Nearly all milk sold in California is pasteurized and meat is inspected before being sold.

SAN FRANCISCO – Napster Inc.’s bankruptcy filing Monday won’t alter rulings by a judge and a federal appeals court that the Internet song-swapping service unlawfully violated the music industry’s copyrights.

In the closely watched copyright infringement case, the music recording industry convinced U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Napster’s business model was illegal.

Because it allowed millions of music fans to download and swap copyright music for free, Patel last year ordered the online service shuttered until it could guarantee none of the music it allowed to be shared was copyright.

While the bankruptcy immediately halts that case, which has been in the pretrial stage for three years, Monday’s bankruptcy developments let stand the nation’s first precedential rulings outlawing Napster-like businesses.

“Certainly, the rulings from the 9th Circuit and the court remain in effect,” said Harvey Dunn, a Dallas-based technology lawyer. “Any third party seeking to emulate Napster is going to face that same case law trying to do something comparable to what Napster was doing.”

The Recording Industry Association of America, a legal trade group representing the big recording labels in the copyright case, has launched new suits at other firms with Napster-like models. In doing so, they are invoking precedents born in the Napster case.

Still, the bankruptcy shields Napster from perhaps paying hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to the industry for violating its copyrights.

But while the recording industry may not recoup all or any of its losses from copyright violations, experts said the recording industry was victorious nevertheless. By flexing its legal muscle, it trampled a business allowing 60 million Napster users to violate the industry’s copyrights with the click of a computer mouse.

Indeed, Conrad Hilbers, Napster’s chief executive, said in a statement Monday that the bankruptcy filing was a legal maneuver to assist it in becoming a legitimate online music service.

DALLAS – Phone company SBC Communications Inc. and online giant Yahoo! Inc. have teamed up to launch an Internet service they hope will challenge AOL and Microsoft for dominance of the dial-up market.

SBC and Yahoo plan to add a cobranded high-speed Internet access service this summer. SBC is a leading provider of faster, so-called broadband service.

The companies did not disclose financial terms, but officials said SBC and Yahoo will share revenue from online advertising and commerce. In addition, Yahoo will receive a portion of every monthly subscription service, they said.

The service, called SBC Yahoo Dial, will charge $21.95 per month; less for customers who order other services from SBC.

Despite its relatively slower speed, far more U.S. households still use dial-up service instead of high-speed access through phone lines or cable modems. Jason Few, an SBC vice president working on the joint venture, said dial-up is not a dying technology.

“I don’t see the dial-up business going away for quite some time,” Few said. “We have an opportunity to grow our share.”

San Antonio-based SBC has 1.8 million dial-up subscribers, who will be folded over into the joint venture.

The SBC-Yahoo partnership was announced in November, but the companies had not disclosed many details until Monday. SBC Yahoo Dial is being advertised online and by direct mail, with a radio and newspaper advertising campaign expected to begin in about two weeks.

Frederick Moran, an analyst for Jefferies & Co., said the venture represented an attempt by Yahoo to barter its Internet name for subscription-service income.

“It’s a sensible way for Yahoo to capitalize on their Internet name, but whether this will lead to additional profits remains to be seen,” Moran said. “The demise of Internet advertising is still a big overhang for Yahoo stock.”

Yahoo claims a user base of 237 million people for its Web site. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company lost $93 million on revenue of $717 million last year, while SBC earned $7.2 billion on revenue of $45.9 billion.

BEVERLY HILLS – Winona Ryder’s preliminary hearing on shoplifting and drug charges was interrupted Monday when a television camera bumped her on the way into court, and her attorney reported later that she suffered a broken right arm.

Ryder arrived for the hearing late, in time for only brief testimony by a store security official before a lunch break. Further testimony was postponed when she returned to court complaining that she had injured her arm pushing through a crush of reporters and photographers on the way back from lunch.

Her attorney was at her right side as she walked through the crowd, and television footage showed a sheriff’s deputy appearing to collide with a cameraman, who fell into the diminutive actress from the left. As the deputy stumbles, Ryder, who had been smiling, can be seen suddenly grimacing in pain.

Ryder was cradling her left elbow after emerging from the group of reporters at the courthouse door, however, leading prosecutors to raise questions about which arm was really hurt, said Jane Robison, a district attorney spokeswoman.

Her attorney, Mark Geragos, said later that she was “whacked” on her right elbow from behind. She was holding her left arm in order to elevate her right arm, which she had previously broken about a year ago while filming the upcoming comedy “Mr. Deeds,” he said.

“She’s in a lot of pain,” Geragos added.

When Ryder emerged from the judge’s chambers her coat was off and she had a large white bandage on her right elbow. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Elden S. Fox said that Ryder would be seen by a physician and the hearing would be delayed.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK – An injured rock climber was rescued by helicopter Monday after spending a night on a sheer granite wall.

The climber was injured Sunday when loose rocks tumbled on him and he fell a short distance, said park spokeswoman Deb Schweizer. He injured a shoulder and elbow.

The Colorado man, whose name was not immediately released, was attempting a challenging route on Cathedral Rocks, a dramatic peak across the valley from El Capitan. He was about 300 feet short of reaching the top of the 2,000-foot climb.

A man and woman were killed last year climbing the same route, Direct North Buttress. A park investigation said falling rocks caused the deaths, Schweizer said.

The stranded climber spent the night on a ledge with his partner until a team of rescuers reached him and hauled him to a place where he and a ranger could be lifted to safety by helicopter.

Berkeley leaders are taking the adage “being green” to the next level. The city plans to start sapping the sun's free and clean energy with planned implementation of solar panels atop the downtown Public Safety Building in 2004.

Having already made city facilities more energy-efficient, going solar will help the city meet its stated goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent by 2010.

"Converting municipal buildings to solar fits right in with everything we're doing," said Councilmember Linda Maio, who authored the recent proposal to use solar energy. "It's the cleanest and best renewable energy source there is. It would be so wonderful to convert to solar power.”

Approximately 12 percent of the electricity generated in California comes from renewable resources. At one time, Californians had direct access to renewable energy, meaning they had the option of purchasing electricity from companies that guaranteed that half the power came from renewable energy—including solar power, wind power and geothermal heat.

Since that option has not been available to consumers since the energy crisis in 2000, Berkeley leaders are now embracing their green momentum and taking measures into their own hands.

While it was originally believed that the best solar project would include placing photovoltaic panels on the roofs of several city buildings, recent city research has revealed that a one-step-at-a-time approach will save time, money and energy in the long run.

"Our research is showing that if we do several small projects, we'll pay more. So in order to make this cost effective we want to concentrate on one building," said Energy Planner Neal De Snoo, who said the Public Safety Building was selected because of its high level of energy consumption and the large size of its new roof.

The project's first stage includes determining engineering specifications, taking the project to bid, selecting a contractor and solar voltaic panels and connecting the solar source to the broader electricity grid. The panels will tie into the building's main electrical supply, so when the amount of energy harnessed exceeds the amount consumed by the building, the energy usage dial will spin backwards, creating a net reduction in the amount of energy purchased from PG&E.

The panels will be hidden from the view of pedestrians, lying flat on the roof of the building. They are designed by Berkeley-based PowerLight Corp., a brand currently used by Whole Foods. Most other makes of panels tilt upwards to face midrange spring and autumn sun exposure and are more visible.

Funding issues surrounding the solar panel project will be included in next years' budget hearing which will go before the City Council early this month. The solar project will be phased in over two years, combining the budget for two fiscal years into one pool of money. Next year's funds will be allocated towards design and engineering work, with the actual placement of the panels coming once the 2004 funds are available.

"We've gone pretty far in energy conservation and efficiency. It can be done quite easily and we’re doing that," said De Snoo. "So the next phase is to go to the next level of generating our own energy."

Going solar is just one step in the city’s effort to step a little more softly. The energy retrofitting of city-owned buildings has saved tax payers $370,000 and more than 2.1 million kilowatt hours of electricity and has reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 1,200 tons, according to city officials.

This was accomplished by removing incandescent lamps and installing compact fluorescent bulbs, replacing inefficient lamps with new lamps and electronic ballasts, installing occupancy sensors to turn off lights, upgrading heating and ventilation systems and improving building control systems.

Similar upgrades are available to city businesses through the city's energy office, which offers free energy audits and provides financial assistance for projects under the Small Commercial Technical Assistance Program.

Black Oak Books began the city's program eight months ago and has seen their utility bills drop by 35 percent, saving them hundreds of dollars, according to bookstore employees.

I was very pleased that the City Council last week voted to approve an affordable housing project at 2517 Sacramento Street (reported in "Embattled Housing Project Approved," 5/29/02). This project will provide 40 units of much-needed low-cost housing for seniors -- along a major transit route where the demand for parking will be limited. Affordable housing is desperately needed in Berkeley, and this project integrates all the important aspects of reasonable city planning.

For a City Council that is chronically divided along party lines, the votes to approve this project transcended ideology. Progressives like Kriss Worthington and Linda Maio joined conservatives like Polly Armstrong and Mim Hawley to approve the project -- because it was common-sense. As Councilmember Maudelle Shirek said at the meeting, "I do not understand how people can oppose a much-needed, well-designed project."

Sadly, Mayor Shirley Dean voted against it. By siding with a small but vocal minority of neighborhood residents who had already dragged the process for months, delaying the much-needed construction of the project and driving up its costs, Mayor Dean demonstrated her complete disregard for affordable housing in Berkeley.

Unfortunately, this was no surprise. Throughout her career, Shirley Dean has always opposed good projects that create low-cost housing for those who need it the most. In 1995, she opposed a housing project on Rose Street for people with AIDS. Later that same year, she successfully blocked a project to build low-income housing at Haste and Telegraph -- on a lot that has been vacant since 1986. Seven years later, this lot still stands as an eyesore for the Southside community, and a monument to Mayor Dean's abysmal record on housing.

Furthermore, Shirley Dean has also been a consistent opponent of tenants' rights. She opposed the original Measure in 1980 that created rent control -- and has allowed literally thousands of low-income people to stay in Berkeley. Two years ago, she opposed Measure Y -- that has strengthened eviction protections for our most vulnerable tenants. And in 1995, she lobbied the state legislature to pass the Costa-Hawkins Act, which has gutted our rent control system and has shot rental prices up into the outer stratosphere.

As housing continues to be the most important issue facing Berkeley, Mayor Dean is dangerously out of step.

We need a mayor who will support good development projects that create low-cost housing -- not one who will side with NIMBY's to block them. We need a mayor who believes in rent control and will fight to strengthen our ordinance -- not one who is in the pocket of landlords. Finally, we need a Mayor who is committed enough to affordable housing that they are willing to take political risks to do the right thing.

East Bay weather can supply a bumpy ride, too. The California Shakespeare Festival is one of the season’s most pleasant events, but Mother Nature takes a hand in the experience, and her fickle temper forced artistic director Jonathan Moscone to put the best face on the brisk wind buffeting his bundled-up opening night crowd on Saturday.

“Welcome to this beautiful but volatile space!” he said. Everyone laughed. The space, with its rolling green backdrop, is beautiful, but none of us had climbed the slope to the Bruns Theater in the Orinda hills for good weather. We’d come for good theater, and Cal Shakespeare delivered “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” sunny enough to ward off any chill.

Moscone has cast the play in a Victorian mode, the women in hoop skirts, the men in swallowtail coats. That may be a surprise, but it turns out to be remarkably fitting.

In the scramble to reinvent Shakespeare, theater companies run the risk of overproducing his work. Berkeley Rep nearly flattened Much Ado about Nothing last fall, but as Moscone proved in his recent Twelfth Night, he has a light touch. He may nudge Shakespeare, but he nudges him in the right direction, and his decision to render this well-known tale against a milieu of Victorian rigidity, in which women are expected to do what men tell them or else, gives the production a jolt.

Don’t forget, though “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a comedy, it begins when a king threatens to execute a disobedient girl. Of course that dire note soon fades in favor of a more playful one.

The play is a seemingly impossible tangle of angry parents, desperate lovers, mistaken identities, kings, queens, fairies, magic, transformations, journeys that end in lovers’ meetings and even a play within a play, but part of its magic is how Shakespeare threads all these loose ends into a happy dance at the play’s close.

Moscone’s production is itself a happy dance, with help from talented associates. Set designer Riccardo Hernandez lays out a rich grassy sward for royals, rude mechanicals, lovers and fairies to romp on, adding a huge crescent moon, on which Titania and Bottom dally, and a giant picture frame to set off trees strung with enchanted lights. Meg Neville sews up more than a dozen handsome costumes, from Oberon’s rich East Indian robes to

As for the actors, they range from good to outstanding. J. Peter Callendar is strong and sonorous as both Theseus and Oberon, and Nancy Carlin is a richly passionate Titania. Brian Keith Russell makes a nicely restrained Bottom,

Susannah Schulman is a hot and flirty Helena, Andy Murray grins wryly as a Cockney Puck, complete with bowler hat and spats, Elia MacDougall winds Hermia as tight as a clock, Colman Domingo makes a dandy Lysander, and Sky Soleil is a sturdy Demetrius. As Peter Quint, Anthony Fusco manages his amateur actors with fitting comic restraint, and Liam Vincent’s Thisbe is the funniest drag act since Dame Edna.

Though Samuel Pepys found “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” “the most insipid, ridiculous play,” audiences have loved it for 400 years, and Cal Shakespeare’s sharply conceived production reminds us why. It’s performed at 100 Gateway Boulevard, Orinda, until June 23 and will be followed by productions of “Macbeth”, “The Seagull”, and “The Winter’s Tale”. For tickets call 510-548-9666.

The No. 1 Cal men’s varsity eight won its fourth-consecutive Intercollegiate Rowing Association National Championship on the Cooper River in Cherry Hill, NJ, June 31. The winning time of 5:26.81 was just 3 seconds off the course record set by the Bears in 1999. In addition to the varsity eights success, the JV eight also brought home gold for the second consecutive year. For the record, it was coach Steve Gladstone’s 10th Varsity Challenge Cup title-second only to Charles “Pop” Courtney who won 11 titles between 1901-1915.

In the varsity race Cal got up early and stayed up all the way down the course to the finish. The Bears led by three quarters of a length as the crews crossed the 1000 while Wisconsin and Washington battled for second place. Cal stayed in front and was ready to sprint to the line but never needed to use its last gear. The Badgers beat the Huskies to the line, while Oregon State came through Princeton to take fourth as Navy finished sixth.

“It was a solid race,” said senior Scott Frandsen. “We picked up our start the last couple of weeks and we got off the line well today. We settled to a 37.5 and just hit a rhythm that was really, really solid.”

“That was an oarsome race,” said stroke Jeffrey Nalty. “We took it from the start and got like four seats in the opening 20 strokes and we kind of had the race from there. Every move we had we moved away. We rowed with rhythm and we rowed with length and the other crews just couldn’t keep up. The level of collegiate racing in the U.S. has stepped up tenfold from last year and that’s what makes today’s win so satisfying.”

“We weren’t down for one stroke of the race,” said coxswain Michael Vallarelli. “We executed our moves, stayed in the tube and found some really good swing today. Our plan was to not worry about the other crews and execute our race. It was nice that we didn’t have to come from behind against those crews, but so long as we executed our race, I think we’d probably get the same result.”

The Cal JV eight also led it’s race from start to finish. Cal and Washington established themselves as the early leaders with Cornell and Princeton trying to join the fray. At 500 Cal led UW by a third of a length. Cal continued to grow its advantage with four crews battling for second at the 1000. Cal continued to pull away from the pack and outdistanced Cornell and Washington to the finish.

After a excellent semifinal performance by the freshman eight, the Bears could not muster an encore on Saturday. However, the Cal freshman did finish off the season No. 4 in the nation.

The Cal varsity four withstood a strong early push from Wisconsin and Cornell, but emerged with the gold. The Bears open four brought home the silver.

Just two blocks from the Fourth Street retail promenade, the operators of Berkeley’s newest monthly market have aspirations of doing more than just giving a space for local craftspeople to sell their goods.

They want to give them the tools to be successful business people.

The West Berkeley Open Air Market, in its second year, located in a parking lot below the Interstate 80 overpass at University Avenue, is organized by the West Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corp. The market is just one part of their effort to empower the residents of their neighborhood and greater Berkeley.

“I don’t see this as just another marketplace but as a place to exchange ideas,” said Willie Phillips, president of the 10-year-old corporation, which receives funding from the city of Berkeley and private foundations.

The market fosters cooperation between established vendors and part-time craftspeople who want to go into business for themselves.

“It’s a super good idea. I try to get people into this business all the time,” said Michael Brady, a jewelry vendor for 20 years. But Brady admits that artisans starting out face greater obstacles than he did.

“Twenty years ago this area was wide open. Now if you go to K-Mart, they have the same type of stuff that I sell. To start out now it’s tougher for sure,” he explained.

For aspiring entrepreneurs in West Berkeley the obstacles are numerous. “People like this are invisible to banks and the Small Business Authority,” said Betsy Morris, the corporation’s secretary. “A lot of people here don’t have homes, and if you don’t own your home, you have [any] capital and can’t get money.”

In addition to financial concerns, Phillips notes that new vendors also need business training and connections in order to have the chance to be successful.

To help them in their endeavors, the corporation holds business training workshops. The programs are free, and offer interested parties counseling from successful vendors and small business people as well as access to agencies and organizations that provide financial, legal and logistical assistance.

According to Morris, the country’s changing economy makes this program especially vital to local residents. “The whole economy is moving to self-employment. This is a pre-emptive effort for the community,” Morris said.

For Phillips, who has lived in West Berkeley for 47 years, promoting economic self-sufficiency is not just attacking an isolated issue, it’s fighting a core ailment that has afflicted his neighborhood for years.

“It’s really important to have creative ways to deal with the problems. Many people don’t connect the crime to economic issues,” said Phillips, who noted that the amount of money Berkeley allocates for economic development is minuscule in comparison with that earmarked for public safety.

“We are trying to make that link, and create opportunity for people,” said Phillips.

According to Bruce Williams, the market’s manager, there is already a success story. Last year an aspiring silk maker, set up shop at the market and took the seminar. He now owns his own shop in Oakland.

Some vendors at Sunday’s market hoped that they too could make the transition to full-time businessperson. “I’d definitely be interested,” said Rhonda Hartzell a jewelry maker. “I think it would be a great thing to do.”

After a major earthquake, highways and transit will be unusable due in large part to liquefaction and collapse of structures. The main forms of transportation will be walking, bicycles (which can be lifted over obstructions) and ferries. Fires in the cities may require mass evacuation. Planning now is needed to reduce the suffering and confusion when it happens.

For those reasons, the availability of ferries is essential. A number of functioning ferries should be already in place and ready when needed. Landing piers at key locations should ready with at least minimum bus service right now. Whether those buses will actually be able to be used immediately after a quake is incidental, as clearing the bus routes connecting with the ferries should take top priority for people to escape. Piers should be built even in locations where ferry service is not currently provided.

The more use of ferries that we can make now the better, and whether they make money is incidental to having them available when needed. The expansion of an existing basic ferry system and bus connections will be much simpler than starting from scratch during the turmoil after a big quake.

Whether you are a seasoned veteran of the pre-Classical music scene or a curious newcomer, this week’s Berkeley Festival and Exhibition provides a wide range of opportunities to binge in gluttonous aural indulgence, or sample a new but ancient part of the musical palette.

Fans of exotic instruments will be interested in several rarities to be heard during the festival. Of course the most common keyboard instruments will be harpsichords and organs. Plucked string instruments will be mostly lutes and

theorboes, and recorders will be played by virtuoso musicians.

The Artaria Quartet features the basset clarinet while performing several Mozart pieces. This will give the clarinet parts a warmer timbre than usual, and present a tonal blend closer to that which Mozart's audiences would have

heard. Of course their bowed instruments have gut strings, further sweetening the blend.

Female composers play prominent roles in several of the festival’s programs. The brilliant baroque chorale and instrumental ensemble Magnificat will sing psalms and motets of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani. The ensemble Anima Fortis will perform works of Barbara Strozzi and Isabella Leonarda. The medieval quintet Heliotrope will feature compositions of female troubadors.

The most unusual offering of the festival is an equestrian ballet. That's right-- dancing horses! "LeCarrousel du Roi" returns by popular demand after proving a smash hit at the 2000 Berkeley Festival. Some of the finest riders on the west coast will show off the artistic talents of their great noble beasts as dressage shades into dance. This fabulous spectacle is sure to convert many early music fans to lovers of equestrian arts and convince horse lovers of the joys of Renaissance music. These performances are the only ones which happen outside of Berkeley. They will take place in Walnut Creek at the Heather Farms Park.

Much of the music presented in this Festival is vocal. Many listeners who feel that "classical" singing style is too artificial and unnatural will be pleasantly surprised by the subtle and sweet vocal technique employed by Renaissance and Baroque performers. These singers aim for beautiful, clear and poetic expression of the text, rather than the bombastic power which characterizes operatic technique.

Those who perform early music will be especially delighted by the huge exhibition of music publishers and instrument builders. Craftsmen and scholars come from all over the world to display their wares. This exhibition will be open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. in Zellerbach Hall.

Many of the Festival's performances are scheduled during the morning hours and afternoons, so the ambitious concert-goer can easily attend several performances daily.

Although the Bay Area is one of the recognized centers of early music performance, there won't be a concentration of pre-Classical music again until the next Berkeley Festival in the summer of 2004.

Some of the concerts that merit special attention are:

• The local ensemble Baroque Etcetera performs Bach's Cantata #78, which KPFA listeners will recognize as an often-heard theme, especially on Sunday mornings.

Kamaiya Warren and Solomon Welch each won medals at the CIF State Championship track & field meet on Saturday in Norwalk.

Warren pulled off the double for which she has waited three years, taking third in both the shotput and discus. After reaching Saturday’s final on her last throw of Friday trials, Warren clinched third on her final throw with a toss of 45’10 3/4”. The UCLA-bound senior didn’t have a discus throw under 147 feet, but her best throw of 158’09” was more than 15 feet short of the winner, Billie Jo Grant of Arroyo Grande. Warren scored 12 points for the Panther girls, who finished tied for ninth overall with 16 points.

The other St. Mary’s points came from Danielle Stokes’ fourth-place finish in the 100-meter hurdles. Stokes ran the race in 14.17, more than a quarter-second slower than her best time, and blamed her finish on contact with another runner.

“I was making contact with (J.W. North’s Domenique Manning),” Stokes said. “We hit each others’ arm four times in the race.”

With the fifth annual Berkeley Arts Festival just around the corner now, festival organizers have begun raising money to create the best possible event in a city they contend is letting its vibrant art scene slowly slip away.

At yesterday’s garden party fundraiser, festival supporters and patrons of the arts gathered to enjoy the sunny Sunday and talk about the state of the arts in Berkeley.

“The City of Berkeley could do a lot more for artists. For a city with our reputation we do very little,” said festival founder and organizer Bonnie Hughes.

While the city has contributed $20,000 to the festival’s $40,000 price tag, Hughes said too often money allocated to the arts funds only highly visible projects, rather than the back-street creators who teeter between starting their artistic career and struggling for a space in which to create.

“A lot of creativity is ignored. People who do more experimental and inventive work don’t get a lot of support,” said Hughes. “It’s those things that are tried and true and sure to bring in the dollars that the city supports. This takes away from the vitality of the art scene.”

Hughes once curated the Berkeley Store Gallery, which has since closed its doors and been replaced by Kinkos.

The Gallery was renowned for its ability to both harness and house the full spectrum of Berkeley artists. There, sculptors mingled with painters, and musicians with poets. Musicians from across the country and from around the world came to the gallery to perform.

However, since its closing in 2000, Gallery artists have percolated into the relative isolation of their respective studios and left part of the art scene disassociated from itself. This is one reason why Hughes believes the festival helps resurrect Berkeley’s artistic community.

“The festival provides visibility for a wide variety of artists and reminds people of the depth and breadth of activity out there in the art world. It’s a worthy thing to do,” she said.

At yesterday’s garden party, few in attendance doubted that the festival would go on if it weren’t for Hughes’ dedication and her seemingly magical ability to organize and raise the much needed and hard-to-come-by funds.

“It takes mavericks like Bonnie to make the event happen,” said Joshua Hayes, a patron of the arts and contributor to yesterday’s fundraiser. He added that Berkeley’s problem with supporting the arts is two-fold.

First, Hayes contends that within the city there is a general apathy stemming from people too stressed and overworked to get involved with the arts. This leaves them with little time to make arts events happen.

Secondly, he said, little space is set aside or made available for the arts.

“The arts aren’t profit driven. They don’t make as much money as Kinkos. We [society] only create space on commercial potential,” he said.

In an effort to diversify and enhance the festival’s artistic experience, Hughes solicited the support and participation of theater stalwart George Cotes. Hughes and Cotes worked together and successfully gained approval from UC theater owners to use their theater from June 5 through November 10. However, the city subsequently denied a use-permit, leaving Cotes’ theater production on hold.

With fingers still crossed, Cotes and Hughes are hopeful that enough support can be mustered to make the production happen.

Despite bumps in the road, Hughes remains focused and determined to make this year’s festival a success. There will be a strong focus on kids’ arts, with the participation of VALA (Visual Arts, Language Arts), a nonprofit groups that helps organize youth art projects ranging from painting to sculpture and poetry.

Burgeoning artists also will be given the opportunity to display their work throughout the festival in galleries and in the streets.

In response to your letter by Susanne K. DeWitt a few days ago, let me first strongly agree with one point: hate crimes are a dangerous thing and we should all be vigilant not to let a climate of mutual suspicion take root in our community. That much I agree with.

However, to attack Councilman Kriss Worthington, who has always been at the forefront of the fight against hatred and injustice, and to claim that he's somehow fostering intolerance by doing so was a bit hypocritical and underhanded.

While everybody agrees that the atrocities of the second World War were barbaric and terrifying, to always bring back the specter of a holocaust of 60 years ago in order to defend Israel's present-day atrocities amounts to little more than an attempt to shut down all voices of dissent and to assist Sharon's unspeakable war crimes.

Please stop using the holocaust to justify Israel's unjustifiable murders of innocent civilians, and stop portraying people, Arabs, Jews and others, who protest those crimes as abettors of anti-Semitism and hate. By doing so, you are sullying the very memories of the holocaust victims you claim to mourn.

The UC students currently being prosecuted have risked being deported for the simple exercise of their First Amendment rights, and that is why, if our country indeed stands for freedom, the resolution proposed by Kriss

Worthington is so necessary. Non-violent civil disobedience is an honored tradition in our country, one that should not lead to such drastic consequences as deportation and a sudden end to one's education.

Thank you, Mr. Worthington for your moral courage and honorable leadership in this matter! Berkeley is proud to always stand alone if need be for the values of justice and freedom. Please never let a vocal minority intimidate you by resorting to the same old tired, self-serving clichés.

YOKOHAMA, Japan – Spain finally figured out how to start a World Cup with a victory. England still doesn’t know how to beat Sweden anywhere.

The Spaniards broke a 52-year winless spell in World Cup openers, dating back to a 1950 victory over the United States. Goals from Raul, Juan Carlos Valeron and Fernando Hierro lifted the Spaniards over Slovenia 3-1 Sunday night (Sunday morning EDT) at Gwangju, South Korea.

“It wasn’t easy, there are a lot of surprises and all games are very close at this level,” Raul said. “There is more to come.”

England must hope there are no more meetings with Sweden ahead. A second-half goal by Niclas Alexandersson gave the Swedes a 1-1 tie and stretched their unbeaten streak against the English to 10 games – 3-0-7 – since 1968. FIFA does not recognize all of those matches.

“It didn’t look good in the first half,” Alexandersson said of Sweden’s one-goal deficit at Saitama, Japan. “We showed a lot of fighting spirit in the second half, when we came back into the game. We could have won the match.”

Also on Sunday, Argentina, the pretournament favorite, edged Nigeria 1-0 at Ibaraki, Japan, while Paraguay and South Africa tied 2-2 at Busan, South Korea.

Gabriel Batistuta, a fixture in the Argentina lineup but questionable to start after a poor, injury-plagued season in Italy, sent an angled header into the net off Juan Sebastian Veron’s swinging corner kick in the 63rd minute.

Batistuta moved into a tie for sixth place in career World Cup goals with 10 with the winner.

“I am not thinking of any records, I don’t care about that,” he said. “But if I score goals, it means that Argentina gets closer every time to our goal, to win the World Cup.”

At Busan, in a half-empty 53,926-seat stadium, South Africa rallied from two goals down against Paraguay.

Quinton Fortune scored on a last-minute penalty kick after a controversial call by the referee. Fortune drove the ensuing kick into the top right corner after the referee judged that Paraguay goalie Ricardo Tavarelli pulled down Sibusiso Zuma. Replays indicated the goalie barely touched Zuma when the South African already was on the way down.

Referee Lubos Michel handed out eight yellow cards, four to each team.

Meanwhile, U.S. coach Bruce Arena indicated star striker Clint Mathis might not start in Wednesday’s opener against Portugal because of a slow recovery from a torn knee ligament.

“It’s been a tough month for him because he was physically behind the other players,” Arena said.

Arena added that Mathis needs to develop a better work ethic.

The most publicized injury, the torn thigh muscle of French star Zinedine Zidane, is making good progress and the midfielder started running again this weekend. France dearly missed its playmaker in a stunning 1-0 loss to Senegal.

Julia Parker sometimes dreams of baskets. After 40 years of weaving baskets and serving as a cultural interpreter with the Indian Cultural Program at Yosemite National Park, Parker, a Kashaya Pomo, hopes others will continue to share her dreams.

Sunday’s Family Day at UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum provided Parker and her daughter, Lucy, such an opportunity to share. The two demonstrated a hands-on approach to the art of native Pomo style basket weaving, told stories and played native games with an audience of both parents and children.

Though the elder Parker did not originally speak the native Pomo language or know how to weave the traditional baskets, she researched her ancestors practices and quickly became an adept weaver. As a National Park Service ranger in Yosemite Valley, the elder Parker’s duties were to both weave baskets and speak with the public.

“After a while they said put down your baskets, you have a lot to say. So I started and now I can’t quit talking,” said the elder Parker.

At the event, Parker and her daughter explained both the practical techniques of weaving and the cultural context of the tradition, emphasizing the importance of patience and resourcefulness.

“Putting together a basket is like putting together a house. We want it to last,” said the younger Parker. “We can’t go to K-Mart or Target to buy our things. So, it’s our responsibility to learn to take care of these materials, these plants.”

According to the younger Parker, who is of Miwok, Paiute and Pomo descent, the materials for the baskets are mostly area specific. The younger Parker and her mother rely on red willow, a plant found on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas near Mono Lake, to construct their Pomo style baskets. While most native groups use willow for weaving material, sumac and various roots including bracken fern root and sedge root are also used.

Constructing the native baskets, used for gathering supplies, preparing food or as toys for children, is a very personal experience according to the elder Parker.

“Each basket tells a story. In our classes we can tell things about the people through their baskets, through the designs,” she said.

The mother and daughter team have crossed the country sharing the history and techniques of their craft. The two hold workshops and camps throughout the year and are often invited to share their knowledge at cultural centers.

For Barbara Takiguchi, coordinator of public programs for Hearst Museum, the mother and daughter represent a link between information and material culture. The cultural interpreters are a part of this year’s “regeneration theme” at Family Day, an event run by the museum for the past 12 years.

“We were looking to make the collections come alive. Julia and Lucy are prime examples of that search. We wanted to provide access to and take the next step to present these objects and this history to the general public,” said Takiguchi.

The four generations of the Parker family represent a strong example of the preservation of history through family.

For the younger Parker, preserving history can be thrilling but also overwhelming. “We get very apprehensive, we want it right now. It’s so important for us to carry this on,” she said.

Researching the traditional dance, games, clothing and weaving from three separate tribes has left the younger Parker well aware of the vastness of her ancestor’s cultural history and the importance of preservation.

For the mother and daughter, teaching is the best way to preserve. “We can teach each other and the best way to learn is at home, to teach your family,” said the younger Parker.

For Takiguchi, showing children the similarities of culture is a critical step in eliminating prejudices. “I always thought the program should show what makes us similar, what makes us human. With Family Day, when the children start to see that, they don’t form judgments, and that can be extremely valuable,” said Takiguchi.

According to Oakland resident Janet King, much can be learned from the cultural presentation. “I think this is about time. We’re such a fast culture, we’re always worried about time. To take the time to do a basket, I think a lot of people will realize the prayers, the thoughts that go into this. It’s not about how fast you make it. It’s not about speed,” said King.

Sunday’s presentation provided parent Burke Treidler an opportunity to expose his daughter to something she otherwise would not get the chance to see. “I wanted to find something cultural for the kids to do,” said Treidler.

By the end of the presentation, the elder Parker led a circle of children in a traditional Native American gambling game played with dice made from walnuts. As Parker instructed the children on how to play the native game, she added “You know, we like to have fun every once in a while too. We aren’t always weaving baskets.”

EAST PALO ALTO — An 8-year-old boy was recovering this weekend after he nearly hanged himself on a school jungle gym with a jump rope a day earlier.

Police say the third-grader almost strangled himself Friday after tying a jump rope to the top of a playground climbing structure and then wrapping the other end around his neck before jumping.

Three young classmates held his body up to keep the rope from tightening, police said.

The boy lost consciousness and suffered a mild seizure after playground monitors loosened the rope and brought him down. He was resuscitated by a school aide who performed CPR, police said.

San Mateo County Sheriff’s Sgt. Rick Yearman said the boy didn’t intend to harm himself and the incident is being treated as an accident.

The boy was taken to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford where he was listed in good condition.

Murder suspect grabbed in bridge chase

SAN RAFAEL— A homicide suspect led authorities on a chase that reached 100 mph and crossed the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge before the man was run off the road and arrested Saturday afternoon.

Acting on a tip, Contra Costa sheriff’s deputies spotted John Krause in El Sobrante around 4:15 p.m. — and the pursuit began. Krause was wanted for allegedly shooting a Vallejo man last May.

Krause eventually wound his way through Richmond and onto the bridge, sheriff’s Lt. Larry Gregg said. On the other side, San Rafael police picked up the chase, which ended around 4:50 p.m. when cruisers pushed him off the road and boxed in his gray Honda.

No one was injured, San Rafael Sgt. Erik Masterson said, though several patrol cars were damaged.

Contra Costa deputies arrested Krause and will transfer him to Vallejo, Gregg said.

New toll rate on Golden Gate

SAN FRANCISCO — Golden Gate Bridge officials say they need to increase tolls to $5 — though $8 would be even better.

Bridge District officials are considering proposals that would raise the toll from its current $3 per car to $5 to help reduce the $452 million budget deficit they expect in five years.

Angry commuters who attended a special meeting Thursday suggested the district only needed the money to pad the wallets of bridge managers.

Bridge officials explained the bridge is in poor shape financially, and that even a $5 toll won’t balance the budget — they said an $8 toll is what the bridge really needs.

Spilled fish slow traffic

SAN FRANCISCO — A messy spill of fish parts backed up traffic for hours on the Bay Bridge as commuters tried to escape the city Friday afternoon.

The spill happened on the lower deck just west of Yerba Buena Island around 1:30 p.m., according to the California Highway Patrol. The driver continued on for several miles before stopping — officer Erika Winfield said he might not have realized what happened.

SAN FRANCISCO — At least 100 people were left homeless early Sunday after a fire ripped through a residential hotel.

No one was seriously injured in the blaze, but 25 to 30 residents had to be rescued from fire escapes and the roof. Three people suffered minor smoke inhalation and were taken to San Francisco General Hospital, said San Francisco Fire Capt. Pete Howes.

Fire officials were unsure what caused the three-alarm fire at the Baldwin Hotel just before 4 a.m. It started on a second-floor light shaft of the 200-room hotel and then spread to the roof and attic, Howes said.

The American Red Cross set up an emergency shelter for those who were displaced by the blaze. It was unknown when residents would be allowed to return or how much damage was sustained, Howes said.

OJAI — A 700-acre wildfire burned out of control Sunday along the steep, brush-covered hillsides of Los Padres National Forest, destroying an abandoned building and prompting the evacuation of two campgrounds.

Campers left Pine Mountain, about 12 miles northeast of Ojai in Ventura County, as firefighters battled the growing flames in windy, dry weather that included temperatures in the 80s.

A stretch of scenic Highway 33 was closed and the flames threatened a nearby ranch, said Kathy Good, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Forest Service.

Air tankers, water-dropping helicopters and about 800 firefighters attacked the blaze, which was reported on private land in the National Forest about 3 p.m. Saturday. The cause was under investigation.

“We’re hoping to catch this fire in the next couple of days because of unfavorable weather predictions for later in the week,” said Joanne Guttman, a spokeswoman for the Forest Service.

By Sunday afternoon, the fire had destroyed an abandoned building once used for pack horses, Guttman said.

Officials had originally estimated 1,200 acres were on fire but revised that after taking new measurements Sunday morning.

The last known wildfire in the area was one of the largest in California history — 1932’s Matilija Fire, which covered 219,300 acres, Good said.

Meanwhile, a California Department of Forestry fire chief apologized to San Bernardino residents for losing control of a fire-training exercise that may have sparked a 2,650-acre blaze near homes in the San Bernardino National Forest.

The blaze was 60 percent contained Sunday with full containment expected by Friday.

“We should not have burned there,” Tom O’Keefe, San Bernardino unit chief for the Department of Forestry, told more than 130 residents during meetings Saturday in the mountain resorts of Running Springs, Lake Arrowhead and Crestline. “I am sorry. I can’t apologize enough.”

“There was a very narrow window where we do this kind of training, and we exceeded that window ... There will be repercussions for this,” he added.

The blaze began Friday near state Highway 18, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. It came within four miles of Lake Arrowhead and singed a wing of Arrowhead Springs resort, a 1930s hotel now used by a theology school. The fire also destroyed five outbuildings, but there were no evacuations

SAN FRANCISCO – The dot-com boom may be bust, but multimedia art still thrives on the Internet, where audiences hungry for authentic, uncensored creative content are clicking through “webisodes” in droves.

Using Flash animation software, programmers can create original 5-minute cartoons, build fine art images or design games where people can pound Osama bin Laden bloody in a virtual boxing ring.

A number of artists have attracted cult followings, and some are drawing enough of an audience to make money through advertising and subscriptions.

Macromedia Inc.’s $500 Flash animation software isn’t the only multimedia tool available for building 3-D graphics, Internet art and high-end animation. But because it is so easy to use, Flash has become the industry standard.

For artists exploring this medium, the Internet has obvious appeal.

“Unlike being an unpublished novelist or underground painter, with tools like Flash, you can distribute your work to millions,” said Stewart McBride, president and founder of United Digital Artists in New York. “You can be a Vincent van Gogh of the Web and actually be known in your lifetime. With traditional media that is not always possible.”

The audience for Flash toons is small — hampered somewhat by the slow growth in fast Internet connections — but has potential, since Flash player software comes installed on most personal computers.

About 1.3 million copies of Flash have sold since 1996. During the dot-com boom, many corporations used it to give their Web sites some sizzle. Flash is used in online greeting cards, music videos, art museum installations, even the intro to the Rosie O’Donnell TV show.

Much of that corporate money is harder to come by nowadays, but Flash artists are still out there, trying to revolutionize art, cartoons and online entertainment.

“Some little broke artist with a computer, can dabble with art, music and movies now. That’s what’s happened,” said Joe Sparks, a former punk rocker and pioneering video game developer who dresses in black and wears his hair like Elvis.

Sparks — who worked with entertainment site AtomShockwave.com — was laid off last summer like many other dot.commers, but not before making a big splash with “Radiskull and Devil Doll.”

He whipped up the story as a demo and put the rock-n-roll toon — which he wrote, narrated, animated and composed — on a Web site, telling a few colleagues to check it out.

Word spread and two weeks later Radiskull had 100,000 page views. His story line based on the pair of lovable demons was on its way to becoming an Internet hit.

“I never got quite a visceral first reaction to anything I have ever done,” said Sparks, who created the breakthrough CD-ROM video games “Total Distortion” and “Spaceship Warlock” in the 1990s.

Sparks says even he doesn’t quite understand the appeal of his 10-minute webisodes, in which Devil Doll rides a Harley too large for him, tries hard to be bad and smiles innocently when doing evil.

“Joe has become kind of a cult hero for a lot of people,” said Scott Roesch, a vice president at AtomShockwave.com, which owns and makes ad revenue off Spark’s toon.

In his apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, Sparks works in a compact studio full of music mixers, computers and software manuals. He gets up to 50 e-mails a day from fans, as well as photos of their Radiskull and Devil Doll tattoos, Halloween costumes and children’s coloring sketches.

The college students and cubicle dwellers who follow each webisode often recite lines from the show such as, “We’ll be back to kick it later.” In Japan, a company is planning to market hundreds of 10-inch stuffed Devil Dolls, candies and other merchandise.

Flash toons create traffic for AtomShockwave.com. The Web entertainment spinoff of Macromedia now has about 45 employees, down from 170. But Roesch said the business is stabilizing as advertisers pay to reach subscribers who generate 18 million unique page views a month.

“We have this kind of coffee break phenomenon where people take a break, watch a movie or animation and then go back to work,” Roesch said.

Programmer Jonathan Gay began developing the product that would become Flash in 1993. He eventually sold his company, FutureWave, to Macromedia in 1996, where he still works.

Flash has some depth as a multipurpose tool with its own programming language called Action Script, which developers use to improve features on corporate Web sites. Macromedia wants to market the software more toward those practical (translate: profitable) corporate uses, such as interactive online tours for car dealers.

Meanwhile, Flash art has been recognized as its own category at South by Southwest and other film festivals, and there is an undercurrent of Flash artists determined to do their own, decidedly uncommercial thing.

Sparks is gearing up this month to launch “Dickey and Jackie,” a toon exploring a simply drawn world of preschoolers against a backdrop of rock music.

People may hate it — he won’t know until he puts it online for the world to see. Then again, popular appeal isn’t necessarily the point.

“Hundreds of years ago, only kings could dabble in music and art,” said Sparks. “Now, there’s a lot of opportunity for people like me who are loners and like to chisel stuff out and share it with others.”

Here’s a glimpse of two better-known Flash programmers:

Name: Todd M. Rosenberg

Location: New York City

Site: http://www.oddtodd.com

Specialty: Laid off by AtomShockwave last summer, Rosenberg created OddTodd, a Flash toon celebrating the life of a laid-off dot.commer. With more than a million hits and $10,000 donated to his tip jar, Todd had to return some of his unemployment benefits to the state of New York.

What he does and why: “Somehow they know from watching a cartoon that others have had a tough time finding a job. ... Even if I get a job, I will keep the Web site and keep making cartoons.”

———

Name: Joe Shields

Location: Grand Rapids, Mich.

Site: http://www.joecartoon.com/

Specialty: A former T-shirt designer and cartoonist, Shields sells advertising space and markets his toons and interactive games. Visitors can beat up Osama bin Laden and run cute frogs through a virtual blender. Shields — whose Humvee has splattered gerbils painted on the sides — is the master of road kill gimmicks, and the site is not for animal lovers.

What he does and why: “Deep-seated anger over the loss of a puppy to Niagra Falls. His leash broke while I was joyously swinging him in a circular motion about my head. It was horrible ... I don’t wanna talk about it.”

STINSON BEACH – The surfer who was attacked by a shark at Stinson Beach was recovering over the weekend and talking about the toothy beast that nearly took him down for good.

Speaking from his hospital bed Saturday, Lee Fontan, 24, of Bolinas, said he’s just glad to be alive. He spent much of the weekend watching World Cup soccer games on television and reflecting on the attack.

“I saw the jaws of death ... right in front of my face,” he said. “I can’t believe he didn’t bite my hand off.”

Fontan was in critical condition following the attack, but that was upgraded to fair on Sunday. He received 100 stitches during a one-and-a-half hour operation on his leg and shoulder.

Fontan was attacked Friday about 300 feet off Stinson Beach, 20 miles northwest of San Francisco. He was plucked from his surfboard by a shark that witnesses said was about 15 feet long.

Fontan told the San Francisco Chronicle that he never saw the shark coming until it was too late.

“It grabbed me ... just like a freshwater bass will grab a frog,” Fontan said. Witnesses said the shark lifted Fontan high out of the water in its jaws.

He plans to resume surfing once he fully recovers.

Another shark attack occurred Friday when a shark bit the foot of a teen-ager swimming about 200 feet off Florida’s St. George Island, police said.

The 16-year-old boy underwent three hours of surgery after attack and was recovering well, said Jay Abbott, chief of St. George Island Fire and Rescue.

The boy was vacationing on the island with his family. He was released from a Panama City hospital Saturday, but his name was not released.

SAN FRANCISCO – Organizers of the California AIDS Ride said Saturday that a competing ride and a lawsuit claiming the event doesn’t give enough of its proceeds to research have cut by half the number of participants in this year’s trek.

About 1,200 people have signed up for the grueling seven-day ride between San Francisco and Los Angeles along Highway 1, and organizers said they expect about two thirds of those will actually embark Sunday on the 575-mile trek. Last year, the AIDS Ride attracted 2,600 participants.

One reason for the low turnout is that some riders participated in the AIDS/LifeCycle Ride, which took place two weeks ago, according to Craig E. Thompson, an AIDS Ride organizer and executive director of AIDS Project Los Angeles.

“There is this group of ... people who do rides and now we have forced them to make a choice,” Thompson said. “We have forced a division, and that’s unfortunate.”

The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation organized the LifeCycle Ride after claiming that not enough funds are going toward their programs.

In 2000, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation received 65 cents of every dollar raised. Last year, spokesman Gustavo Suarez said, that went down to about 50 cents. Expenses generally should not exceed 35 cents per dollar, according to the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance.

A lawsuit filed by a Berkeley bicyclist in April made a similar claim that AIDS Ride organizers were taking too much of the money they raised.

Mark Cloutier sued Los Angeles-based Pallotta Teamworks, alleging the AIDS Ride organizer has misrepresented and mismanaged the amount of money distributed to nonprofit agencies for research. Cloutier said Pallotta delivered less than one-third of the $28 million it received from its 2000 and 2001 Vaccine Rides to charities that conduct AIDS vaccine research.

SAN FRANCISCO – The Ravenswood school district is under fire from the state for its failure to improve its special education and the unethical behavior of some of its administrators.

The California Department of Education wants to take over Ravenswood school district because, it says, its administrators have failed to serve disabled children.

The state filed a takeover plan Friday that says it would appoint an administrator to replace the superintendent and the locally elected school board, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

The state-appointed administrator would serve for two years and under his or her tenure progress reports would be submitted to the every three months.

The Ravenswood school district, which serves East Palo Alto and eastern Menlo Park, has been sued for its poor record in serving children with disabilities and last year a judge found it in contempt of a federal court order.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson gave its administrators a final chance to prove their competence before ordering a takeover. He also ordered the district to pay a $10,000 fine and to reimburse lawyers representing disabled students.

Henderson will hold an evidentiary hearing on June 18 to determine the school district’s progress and to decide whether a state takeover should take place

But report cards by a court-appointed monitor reveal Ravenswood has not made much improvement and now, one of its principals is under scrutiny for allegedly submitting bogus petitions to a federal court.

In December, the district suspended Costano School Principal Marthelia Hargrove for her role in submitting signatures collected for other matters and turning them in under a new heading related to the special education case.

Earlier this week, Superintendent Charlie Mae Knight submitted a sworn statement to the court saying the school board is “pursuing the dismissal” of Hargrove.

SACRAMENTO – It was nearly 40 years ago that California set a national trend by creating a comprehensive Master Plan for Higher Education, a blueprint for the state’s public universities and community colleges.

Now, state officials again are in the spotlight as they attempt to expand that plan to include preschool through high school.

The ambitious and unprecedented project started in 1999 after the state Legislature created the Joint Committee for Master Planning, which is made up of nine senators and 10 assemblymembers.

Now, the plan is almost complete and a rough draft was released in May. The final version is expected in August.

The plan will serve as a roadmap for students as they enter preschool and make their way through college. It comes with recommendations that the Legislature will implement in coming years to try to unite the fragmented and troubled educational system.

It will also try to smooth the transition for students as they leave high school and go to college or enter the work force.

Navigating students through to higher education is hardly a new idea, says Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

“There’s a big effort going on in the country to close the gap between the various levels of education to make the transition for students better,” Callan said. “Different states have different strategies for how to do that.”

Florida tackled the problem by consolidating all public education — schools, colleges and universities — under a single state board of education.

More than a dozen other states already have K-16 councils. Maryland has set up a voluntary statewide council and Georgia is on its way to creating a mandatory council.

Lora Weber, spokeswoman for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, said the Legislature has been trying for years to approve bills that would have combined the K-12 education department with the Higher Education Board.

“We’re always doing things in joint efforts. We have the (preschool) through 16 Council, but it’s really just an ad hoc group,” Weber said.

Stephan Blake, chief consultant for the joint committee, said the Legislature decided to redraft the plan to coordinate the attempts at education reform, which up until now have been disjointed efforts to improve only parts of the education system at any given time.

“We really have been operating without any kind of vision or framework,” Blake said. “The higher education Master Plan not only laid out a framework that led to our success, but it also gave great stability to the policy arena, whereas there is no stability around K-12 policies.”

The preliminary plan recommends a number of changes to the current system. In the initial phase of a child’s education, the plan suggests requiring full-day kindergarten classes and universal access to preschool. The plan also suggests increasing funding to screen children for developmental disabilities before they become barriers to learning.

On the other end, as students prepare for college, it suggests creating a standard high school curriculum and coordinating it with the requirements to get into college.

Other states, like Oregon, are also pushing to require public institutions to accept high school exit examinations in place of standardized assessment tests.

At the state level, the plan says changing the education governance structure is necessary. It recommends making the Department of Education part of the governor’s cabinet.

“We think that if we are going to have meaningful accountability we need to make changes in the alignment of the authority,” Blake said.

The rough draft is the product of years of working with California educators, parents, education experts and business leaders to design a blueprint that state officials can work with, Blake said. Now that they have a working plan, they are asking for public input.

Starting Monday, the committee will operate a two-week online forum, where people can discuss the various elements of the plan with the educators, business leaders and state officials who developed it. They will also hold hearings around the state this summer. The committee will make changes based on those comments.

And when the time comes to adopt the final project, the committee expects education experts across the nation to be watching.

“California is usually ahead of the curve on taking on these issues,” said Gordon Vanderwater, a researcher for the Education Commission of the States. “Everyone is going to be very interested.

“But California is so big that other states may have a hard time relating,” he added. “California faces immigration issues, language barriers, diversity and urban issues. These issues aren’t unique, because other states face them too, but not on such a grand scale.”

Whether the plan will improve the California education system is up to the politicians, according to Lance Izumi, director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Center for School Reform.

“It’s a massive, massive plan,” Izumi said. “If the committees and Legislature get bogged down in minutia, it’s going to be overwhelming.”

“This thing can be a reform document or something that just tinkers at the edges,” he said. “It’s up to the Legislature as to what kind of document they want to lead them in the coming decades.”

SACRAMENTO – A four-member disabled climbing team made history early Saturday, becoming the first paraplegic climbers to reach the 14,162-foot summit of northern California’s Mt. Shasta.

The team of climbers, each disabled in previous skiing, car and climbing accidents, reached the snowcapped peak Saturday morning, said climber Muffy Davis, 29, of Sun Valley, Idaho.

“We’re there. We’re on the summit calling from Mt. Shasta. We are on top of the world, said Davis, a medal-winning member of the United States Disabled Ski Team. Davis suffered back injuries during a 1989 ski accident.

“We’re still celebrating,” she said by cellular telephone from the summit. “Everyone is just high in general.”

The group and its support team, 20 members in all, ascended the mountain during a seven-day, 4.5-mile climb using “snow pods,” hand-cranked machines similar to mini-tractors. On a web site devoted to the climb, members called their Shasta expedition “the largest paraplegic attempt ever organized in the history of mountaineering.”

The machines, developed by Peter Rieke, 48, of Pasco, Wash., a disabled climber on the Shasta ascent and owner of Mobility Engineering, are expected to open mountaineering to more climbers with disabilities.

Rieke, who broke his neck and back during a 1994 climb, developed the snow pods with help of friends over six years. In 1998, he ascended Oregon’s 11,240-foot Mount Hood.

Other climbers to reach the top of Mt. Shasta on Saturday included Mark Wellman, who has climbed El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, and Keegan Reilly, who reached the summit of Colorado’s 14,433-foot Mt. Elbert last summer.

Davis said the team began its final ascent at 7 a.m. Saturday. The climbers, who carried messages of support from around the world, spent the night about 1,200 feet below the mountaintop.

Animal implanted with cloned cells hasn’t rejected new tissue; process could make organ transplants much easier

SAN FRANCISCO – A cow implanted with cells taken from a cloned embryo didn’t reject the tissue, showing the potential of much-debated therapeutic cloning, researchers say.

Cloning technology is controversial and opposed by many, including President Bush and Pope John Paul II, because it requires creating and destroying embryos.

However, some scientists who oppose cloning humans say they believe therapeutic cloning should be pursued because it could supply healthy new tissue to fix a variety of illnesses.

“While more work needs to be done, this demonstrates the potential use of this technology,” said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of tissue engineering at Children’s Hospital Boston and a co-author of the study published in the June issue of Nature Biotechnology.

Using healthy cells cloned with the same DNA of a patient could make difficult organ and tissue transplants much easier, Atala said.

In the study, researchers removed the nucleus from a cow egg and replaced it with a skin cell containing DNA from another cow. They then implanted the cloned embryo into a surrogate cow and let the embryo grow for about six weeks before removing it. They removed heart, skeletal and kidney cells from the embryo, grew them further in the laboratory — even creating mini kidneys — and implanted the cloned cells into the cow that donated the DNA.

They removed the cloned cells after six weeks and found all were thriving. Another cloned set of cells was implanted into the same cow and were found to be functional after 12 weeks. Some of the mini kidneys even produced a urine-like liquid, the researchers said.

While still far from human use, experts say the latest advance demonstrates the disease-fighting potential of the method.

“It’s a very important result,” said Robert Nerem, director of the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues. “Immune rejection is a very big problem in tissue engineering.”

The report comes three months after other scientists used therapeutic cloning to fix genetic illness in mice.

But the fact that an embryo was grown for six weeks in a surrogate instead of a test tube concerned even some therapeutic cloning proponents.

“While the research in animal models shows that it may be possible to use cloning to generate tissues and eliminate tissue rejection, it’s important for the American public to understand that the methods used in this animal experiment should not be pursued in humans,” said Christopher Reeve, the actor who has become a patient advocate since being paralyzed in a horse riding accident.

“Research involving the implantation of a human embryo into a woman, even to derive lifesaving cells, crosses a very important line and we need to pass legislation that would prohibit it,” he said.

The authors of the paper said they too are opposed to recreating the experiment in humans.

“We think it is ethically unacceptable to implant a cloned embryo in a woman for any purpose,” Lanza said.

There are three competing bills pending in the Senate that address the issue of human cloning. One would ban all forms of cloning, while the others would outlaw cloning to create a baby but allow the technology for use in finding disease cures as long as the embryos were destroyed after a few days and never implanted in women.

“The timing of this study could not have come at a better time,” said Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist who supports therapeutic cloning.

xLOS ANGELES – A lawmaker planned to unveil a bill Monday that would raise California’s smoking age from 18 to 21, making it the highest in the nation.

The bill would make it illegal for anyone under 21 to purchase tobacco products, including cigarettes, in the state. All 50 states set a minimum age of at least 18 following a 1992 directive from Congress. In three states — Alabama, Alaska and Utah — the legal age is 19.

State Assemblyman Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood, said the goal is to cut smoking rates among kids in their teens, the age when most smokers pick up the habit.

More than 400,000 deaths each year in the U.S. are attributable to tobacco-related causes, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The American Lung Association estimates about 90 percent of all smokers begin smoking before the age of 21.

“Our highest calling is to do things that save lives and the best way to prevent smoking deaths is to prevent people from becoming addicted to tobacco in the first place. My bill is the best way to do that,” Koretz said.

The move follows a February vote by the California Medical Association to push for the change in state law.

Dr. Leonard Klay, a Santa Rosa obstetrician and gynecologist who introduced the measure at the association’s annual meeting, said a higher smoking age, along with peer pressure and the taxes that make cigarettes unaffordable for many teens, should cut smoking rates.

“If you’re smoking by age 21, it’s very difficult to quit,” said Klay, 64, who smoked for more than dozen years after beginning at age 19.

The American Lung Association initially was cool to the medical group’s proposal, saying it preferred to concentrate on enforcing current tobacco-related laws.

On Friday, however, Paul Knepprath, a lobbyist for the American Lung Association of California, said the group would support the proposed legislation, despite what he called a lack of evidence that a hike in the minimum age would reduce youth smoking.

Anti-smoking activists fear the bill could derail other tobacco-related legislative efforts, including continued pushes to boost taxes on cigarettes.

Gov. Gray Davis has proposed tacking 50 cents on each pack of cigarettes to help close an expected $23.6 billion budget shortfall. The Lung Association and others are pushing to add an additional 15 cents on top of that to go to anti-smoking efforts.

Brendan McCormick, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA, the nation’s largest tobacco company, said the company believes a better approach to curbing youth smoking is enforcement of existing laws, but that it would remain neutral on the bill.

“We will be guided by whatever society says the minimum age should be for tobacco products,” McCormick said.

University of Southern California student Rob Mariano, 21, said he didn’t think tighter access would prevent young people from smoking.

“They can try all they want, but kids are going to find ways to get cigarettes,” said Mariano, who began smoking at 14. Mariano said he bought cigarettes from stores that didn’t ask for identification or had older friends buy them.

Because the deadline for introducing new bills has passed, Koretz planned to amend an existing tobacco-related bill to seek the change in state law.

That bill, AB 1453, would also ban ashtrays where it is illegal to smoke, require them in designated smoking areas and restrict the distribution of free tobacco samples. It has been stalled in the state Senate for the past year.

Local education leaders had mixed reactions to the death of state legislation that would have granted teachers more power over the selection of textbooks and curriculum.

State Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, author of AB 2160, withdrew the bill Thursday night when it became clear that it did not have enough support in the Legislature. This move effectively killed any possibility of its passage this session.

Originally AB 2160 would have allowed teachers, who can only bargain for wages, benefits and salaries, to negotiate the processes for selecting textbooks and curriculum.

Supporters said the measure was necessary to ensure a teacher’s voice in vital classroom issues. Opponents argued that these issues should not be discussed in the adversarial arena of contract negotiations and suggested that the bill, supported by the California Teachers Association, was simply a union power grab.

In the face of strong opposition, Goldberg watered down the bill substantially, calling instead for “academic partnerships” between school districts and union representatives to discuss textbooks and curriculum and make recommendations to local school boards. Opponents said the bill still created an adversarial relationship.

As she withdrew the legislation, Goldberg blasted opponents for distorting “the goals of AB 2160” and vowed to continue the fight in the future.

“This is not over,” she said. “Teachers are professionals and must be leaders in academic reform.”

Local reaction Berkeley Board of Education member Ted Schultz welcomed the demise of the bill.

“I think that’s good,” he said.

Schultz said the legislation in its final form was unnecessary in Berkeley because the district does a good job of incorporating teachers’ input.

“In general teachers’ opinions are well-respected,” said Barry Fike, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers.

But Fike raised concerns about the board’s 3-2 vote two weeks ago to pass a resolution opposing AB 2160.

“It raises some troubling questions,” Fike said, arguing that the vote sends a message to teachers that their voices may no longer be valued.

The board majority refuted that notion at the school board meeting when it cast the vote.

“We strongly believe teachers should be active participants in all these processes,” said board Vice President Joaquin Rivera, who spearheaded the May 22 resolution. “The issue is not teacher participation. The issue is what is the proper forum for participation.”

Schultz said he opposed the bill in its original form because it would have added to the costs of contract negotiations and provided unions with another bargaining chip, delaying the process.

Schultz echoed an argument made by board President Shirley Issel, who said during the May 22 board meeting that the Berkeley Federation of Teachers had held up negotiations over the school calendar and could be expected to do the same with the curriculum and textbook issues.

“They could hold up textbook issues for a year, just to get a two-tenths of a percent wage increase or something,” Schultz said. “It’s ridiculous.”

But Fike said unions would not hold up negotiations over an issue like textbooks because the tactic would only backfire. He also argued that it is, in fact, the Berkeley Unified School District that has held up school schedule negotiations in recent years.

“This year we had our calendar proposal to the district and waited over two months for a response from them,” Fike said.

Board member John Selawsky, who voted against the May 22 resolution, said he was disappointed in the death of AB 2160 in its latest form.

“I think that it was a good compromise and workable,” he said.

Fike said that the bill sparked an important conversation, even if it did not pass.

What would become Berkeley, was once a rural unincorporated part of the Oakland Township. It was sparely populated and mostly used for farming. The photograph shows grassy hillsides and scattered native oaks. The highest spot is Grizzly Peak, which was made level for communication towers. The Eucalyptus trees have not yet been planted.

In 1858 on the advice of Reverend Henry Durant, who would become the first president of the University of California, the non-sectarian private College of California selected property on the north side of Strawberry Creek, at the foot of the hills, for a new campus. The site chosen lay directly opposite the Golden Gate. The name Berkeley was given to the area in 1866.

The college was then located in Oakland, and a site was sought that was away from the distractions of city life, but not isolated. S. H. Willey, one of the trustees of the College stated that "it is a matter of the highest importance that a College should be rightly located."

Although a state university was provided for in the State Constitution in 1849, it was almost two decades before a university was actually established. Using an endowment provided for by the 1862 Land Grant Act, which had been signed by Abraham Lincoln, the State Legislature passed an act in 1866 to establish an agricultural, mining and mechanical college. It was to be located in San Francisco with an experimental farm about two miles north of the College of California property in Berkeley.

The University of California was finally formally created in1868 when the state accepted a donation from the Trustees of the College of California of their Oakland and Berkeley property. The newly created state university now also included an Academic College. When the University began instruction in the fall of 1869 it had 40 students and ten faculty members. The Berkeley campus opened in 1873.

By 1890 the university had grown large enough a botanical garden was established " to form a living collection of the native trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants of the State of California, with the intent to gather in as rapidly as possible those the neighboring states of the Pacific Coast." Comprising only 7 acres on the central campus, the collection grew quickly and in the 1920s was moved to 34 acres in Strawberry Canyon approximately where the Such Ranch was once located.

The landscape design was by J. W. Cregg, of the Department of Landscape Design, who organized the plantings according to their geographical location. The Botanical Garden is open from 9-5 every day and is an enticing world of winding pathways, trickling brooks and ponds, and of course a profusion of plant material from desert cacti to water plants.

Susan Cerny is author of Berkeley Landmarks and writes this in conjunction with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.

This intensely personal feminist work imagines four women artists--writers Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf, and dancer Isadora Duncan--meeting in a garden, where they discuss their life, work, and philosophy.

Fine was a prolific composer with a long career ending with her death in 2000. Her daughter, Peggy Karp, and granddaughter, Keli Fine, both now live in the Bay Area. For this production, they joined with stage director Melissa Weaver to write a short theatrical introduction to the opera. It depicted Fine (Amanda Moody) walking in her garden with her young granddaughter (Cecily Khuner), looking at what Fine calls “some of my favorite flowers.” Each represents one of the four opera characters, and Fine instructs her grandchild to learn from their lives.

The 75-minute opera followed, with each character introducing herself. Although successive scenes include duets, trios, and quartets, there is actually little interaction among the singers. Most of the time, each seems preoccupied with her own thoughts and dreams. The exception is Gertrude Stein (Jennifer Palmer Boesing), who brings humor and warmth to even the most abstract aphorisms, engaging at times with the one male character (tenor Stephen Rumph), who acts as a sort of Everyman in this female world.

“Women” is a highly cerebral work, not terribly accessible as operas go. There is no dramatic action to speak of. What little interaction takes place is fleeting and inconclusive. Most of the time, the four women muse on philosophy or comment on their own lives in a libretto drawn from their writings. The Berkeley Opera program contained much-needed notes and descriptions of each scene, written by the composer and Judith Jamieson, without which the opera would probably have been incomprehensible.

It is the music that gives the piece form and coherence. Fine experimented through her life with modernism, atonality, and many of the innovations of 20th-century music, but her later music embraced harmony and counterpoint as well. “Women” is filled with beautiful interweaving melodies, from a lovely, melancholy soprano and flute duet to a moving harmonic quartet in which Duncan laments the death of her children and the other women gather to comfort her. There is an abundance of musical wit and delight, as well. Stein and the Tenor engage in a musical debate on human nature that is a virtuosi duet of humorous counterpoint and rhythm.

The nine-piece orchestra directed by Lisa Riley was in fine form, and the five singers all demonstrated considerable talent and ease with the challenging score. Narelle Yeo was a sweet-voiced Dickinson, Lanier McNab a suitably dramatic Duncan, and Melissa Xanthe Stevens was prim in the role of Virginia Woolf. Rumph, a Berkeley Opera regular, displayed a warm and appealing tenor voice. Most rewarding to hear was Boesing in the character of Stein. A strong and expressive mezzo-soprano, she admirably fulfilled her role as the narrator who holds the whole work together, both musically (her repeated aphorisms serving as leitmotifs) and dramatically. It is Stein who joins the Tenor in friendship at the conclusion of the opera, suggesting a resolution to male-female conflict.

This production was held at the Hillside Club, whose tiny space was well suited to the intimate nature of the opera. Stage director Melissa Weaver made the most of the small room, with imaginative direction around a central “tree” hung with lights and draped in glittery chiffon, that served as the focal point for a theater-in-the-round presentation. The audience seating was unfortunate, however. Without bleachers or raised seats, anyone who was not lucky enough to be sitting in one of the front rows had to endure obscured views for most of the performance—disappointing after paying $30 a ticket.

Berkeley Opera’s 2002 season theme is “Cherchez la Femme,” an examination of women from various perspectives. The season kicked off in February with “Cosi Fan Tutte,” Mozart’s comic opera about jealousy and romantic rivalry.

The Opera returns to its usual space at the Julia Morgan Center later this summer. The season finale is a revival of local composer David Scott Marley’s opera “The Riot Grrrl on Mars,” inspired by Rossini’s “The Italian in Algiers,” opening July 19. For information, call (510) 841-1903 or check out the company’s website at www.berkeleyopera.com.

California’s top youth tennis players will face off this weekend in a North vs. South showdown at the 29th Annual Maze Cup, to be held at the Berkeley Tennis Club.

The Maze Cup switches between sites in Northern California and Southern California each year, and this weekend is the first time the Berkeley Tennis Club has hosted the event.

Cal men’s tennis coach Peter Wright is the tournament chairman and was instrumental is luring the event to the BTC. Cup founder George Maze, Sr., was a longtime member of the club.

“We’ve been trying to get it to the Berkeley Tennis Club for the last several years, because it’s an event that really belongs here,” Wright said. “This is one of the truly great tennis venues in the country.”

The Maze Cup is made up of four divisions, with two competitors from each section in each division: boys’ and girls’ 16-year-olds and boys’ and girls’ 18-year olds. Each division will feature two singles matches and a doubles match, with the combined scores determining the overall winner in a Davis Cup format. Southern California has dominated the event, with 27 wins in 28 years.

“There’s definitely a rivalry there, but unfortunately Southern California has dominated,” said Todd Mitchell, who coaches Sasha Podkolzina of the Northern California squad. “It would be bigger for Northern California to win than Southern California, just because they have won most years.”

“Southern California is really the cradle of hardcourt tennis in this country,” event organizer Warren Daane said. “I think a lot of people don’t realize just how strong California is in tennis. I think this is the best event in junior tennis in the country.”

The names that adorn the Cup are testament to the rich history of the event. Former participants include Pete Sampras, Michael Chang, Brad Gilbert and Lindsay Davenport.

“You just have to look at the trophy and see who’s played to see what a big event this is,” Wright said. “It’s a virtual who’s who of pro tennis.”

So while the players in this year’s tournament might not be featured on ESPN just yet, there’s a good chance fans might see the next Sampras or Davenport before they hit the big time. This year’s crop includes three players who are ranked in the top five nationally: Sasha Podkolzina and Pramod Dabir from Northern California and Doug Stewart from down south.

“It’s a great level of tennis,” Wright said. “It’s just before they go off to college, and they’re blossoming as tennis players. It’s a good chance to see tomorrow’s stars today.”

Admission is free, and Daane expects a capacity crowd of near 2,000 fans. The 16-year-olds start things off on Saturday with singles matches at 10:30 a.m., with the last matches of the day starting at 4 p.m. Sunday will be a morning affair, with matches starting at 9 a.m. There will be an awards ceremony at 1 p.m. to crown the winners.

Attorneys for EarthFirst! activists Darryl Cherney and the late Judi Bari said at a federal court hearing Friday they would consider dropping unresolved charges against the FBI and the Oakland Police Department to expedite the filing of a judgment in the case.

On June 12 jurors awarded the two activists $4.4 million for violations of First and Fourth Amendment rights by members of the FBI and OPD relating to the investigation of a car bombing that injured Cherney and Bari in 1990. The judgment, however, has not been entered into the court because jurors were undecided on several charges.

The issue of a gag order placed on the jury by federal Judge Claudia Wilken was not resolved on Friday, though Wilken says she will consider reforming the order.

Attorneys for the activists plan to file a motion of dismissal without prejudice on Monday relating to charges of Cherney’s false arrest after the bombing in 1990. The motion would pave the way for the appeals process to start but would not eliminate the plaintiff’s ability to revive the false arrest charges at a later date.

Appeals are expected from both sides in the case but cannot be filed until a judgment is entered into court.

Appeals are expected from both sides in the case but cannot be filed until a judgment is entered into court. According to Robert Bloom, a member of the plaintiff’s legal team, if the motion goes through on Monday, the judgment could be finalized a month from now.

“It’s been 12 years now. We’d really like to see this get resolved,” Bloom said to Wilken at Friday’s hearing.

Though the plaintiffs in the case had considered requesting a new trial for the unresolved charges, Wilken on Friday informed the court that she would not preside over a new trial until September 2003 due to prior scheduling commitments.

Rather than wait, the plaintiffs will pursue a dismissal and said that attorneys for the defense may try to stall proceedings.

After the hearing, Bloom touted as a delaying tactic FBI lead counsel Robert Sher’s requests to wait for court transcripts before replying to a potential motion from the plaintiffs. Sher said in court that the defense would not file an appeal until Sept. 1.

“He wants to stall,” Bloom said. “They (the defense) want to do anything that prevents entry of a judgment. They’ll be stalling until the next century.”

In court Sher argued that the transcripts would be essential to future proceedings. Sher said that he could not speed up responses to motions from the plaintiffs due to prior commitments. Wilken gave the defense two weeks to respond to a potential motion of dismissal from the plaintiffs, and said the defense’s timeline for issuing an appeal was not unreasonable.

Options are being weighed by both sides. According to Cherney, the defense could offer to settle the case in exchange for an agreement not to bring the false arrest charges to a new trial. Or, more likely, each side will appeal charges and possibly proceed with a new trial once the appeals are settled.

“There aren’t any real grounds for the defense to appeal although they have every right to and they probably will,” said Dennis Cunningham, lead counsel for the plaintiffs. “The notion though that they want to take three months before they appeal is ridiculous.”

The plaintiffs want to keep pressure on the FBI and to shed light on what they consider extremely suspect practices of the federal bureau.

Regarding the jury gag order, Wilken says reform may be an option. Lisa Sitkin, an attorney representing the Oakland Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle, argued that the current order was limiting. “There really should be no limit on what the jurors should be able to talk to the press about,” said Sitkin, speaking to Wilken in court.

Wilken issued the order on June 12 to prevent jurors from speaking to the press about the trial because, as she said, such communication would interfere with pending issues in the case.

Cunningham said the plaintiffs are in favor of lifting the gag order, though they did not file a motion to have the order lifted. Maria Bee, an attorney representing the defendants from the OPD, said she believed Wilken’s ruling should stand.

The picture postcard became extremely popular during the first two decades of the 20th century and this era is often referred to as the “golden age of postcards.” Most postcards were published by companies that specialized in the printing of postcards and would usually depicted popular views of a town or important buildings. But during this period people also created their own postcards from a photograph of their home.

The postcard pictured here shows the house at 1511 Edith St. shortly after it was completed in 1908. This area of north-central Berkeley was just being developed at that time and recently completed houses can be seen on the left-hand side of the card and in the background a house is under construction.

The message on the back of the postcard is signed by L. T. Bailey and the number on the pillar of the front porch says 1511. From the 1908 Oakland-Berkeley Directory (available at the Berkeley History Museum) it was easy to discover that L.T. was Lottie T. Bailey, widow of Angelo, and that she lived in the house with Mark G., a student, Lloyd E. a train conductor, Edith C. a teacher, and Effie L. a nurse. Perhaps these were her children, but they may have been a combination of her children and relatives as it was common at the time for extended families to share a house together.

The style of the house is a variation of the Colonial Revival, also known as Classic Box. The exterior treatment of the first floor is typical of a Classic Box with a recessed entry, window bay and narrow clapboard siding. However this house has an extremely tall and steeply-pitched gable roof which shelters a second story and is faced with unpainted brown shingles. In some examples the face of the gabled roof was treated with half-timbering as in a Tudor Revival. The style was quite popular between 1900 and 1910 in Berkeley and Oakland.

These houses were most often built or adapted from house plans that could be ordered from companies such as Alladdin, Gordon-Van Tine, and Radford Homes. The 1910 Gordon-Van Tine catalogue proudly boasted that they “shipped wherever railroads go...we guarantee safe delivery and satisfaction...we save the home-builders of America over $1,000,000 a year.”

Although popular styled houses such as 1511 Edith Street were not individually designed for a specific client or lot, they provided a comfortable and affordable house for the middle class. These types of vernacular structures, looked at from the prospective of cultural geography, social or economic history, contribute as physical artifacts to an understanding of how an average family lived almost one-hundred years ago. Today 1511 Edith Street remains standing proudly, little changed, and a type of home eagerly sought after by contemporary buyers.

Susan Cerny is author of Berkeley Landmarks, and writes this in conjunction with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.

It's been the biggest laugh of the year, watching the political yelping about “under God.”

Of course the court ruling was right: Such a slogan does affirm we are a nation of monotheists.

Well, probably a large majority of us are monotheists, even Judaeo-Christians. Does that mean all of us have to pledge loyalty to the Bible? Must we tie national loyalty to any religious belief, even one as general as monotheism? Most of us do not want to be a theocracy like some of the Islamic countries, but some of us do like the idea of being a “Christian nation,” for example.

Maybe a compromise solution is to amend the Constitution to say we are mostly monotheists, so references to “God” are legal but make it clear that other forms of belief are freely tolerated. The label “in God we trust” doesn’t harm our money. There are times when I want to sing “God bless America.”

I suppose I can skip “under God” when I say the pledge – unless the FBI (Federal Bureau of the Inquisition) starts monitoring me for national religious compliance.

If someone poked his head into the California Theater in downtown Berkeley earlier this week to look at the building undergoing seismic renovation, that person would have had to pass through heavy machinery blocking Kitteridge Street traffic, step over torn-up concrete on the sidewalk and seen ripped carpeting and paint tarps strewn over everything. It did not look like a showcase theater due to open in four days.

Theater manager Dale Sophiea sitting in his small cluttered office on the second floor did not seem concerned by the mess. His theater was going to open, as scheduled, on Friday and it was going to look grand. Even if it takes lots of late nights. Amid the hard-hatted contractors with power tools and welding equipment were Sophiea’s floor staff of ticket-takers and concessions sellers painting the trimming.

Walking through the theaters, Sophiea explained the new green paint job is a vast improvement to the “awful” old brown coat (an improvement that might not be noticed by moviegoers seated in the dark). The new green-and-gold color scheme, he said, will be nicely complimented by the new green floral-patterned carpeting, carpeting which was yet to be laid down.

The cosmetic overhaul is a subsequent improvement during the building’s structural retrofitting. Outside are the external I-beams holding the brick building in a seismically sound iron cage. The earthquake safety upgrade does not affect the size or shape of the auditorium inside, which at 650 seats will still be the largest movie house in Berkeley.

Until last year, the California Theater was the second-largest house in Berkeley, behind the UC Theater on University Avenue. Both theaters, owned by Landmark Theater Corporation (who also own the nearby Shattuck and Act1&2 theaters) were in need of expensive seismic improvements. The California was upgraded and the UC abandoned. The reasons for the loss of the seminal repertory theater are manifold, involving feasibility and return-on-investment. The future of the UC Theater as a cinema and the structural integrity of its large, acoustically-designed auditorium are in dispute between community groups, the owners of the building, and the city of Berkeley, but the chance of it returning to its former glory – a large house screening a calendar of daily rotated movie programming which local buffs held in so high esteem – seem slim.

The California opens this weekend with a new, longer version of “Cinema Paradiso,” the romantic, nostalgic Italian film about a director remembering the theater in the village of his boyhood where he learned to love movies. It was a monster hit in 1988 (it won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) and now has 51 more minutes of rural movie magic.

Landmark wanted to open the California with “Men In Black II” but Sophiea said he pushed for “Cinema Paradiso” because “I wanted to open with something more poetic.” The film about space monsters with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones opens at the California next Wednesday, and it will be business as usual.

At the same time the California re-opens, a small but essential part of Berkeley cinema life is going away. A few blocks down Shattuck Avenue from the California is the independently owned Fine Arts Cinema, which for last four years has been screening bold programming of classics, rarities, art films, documentaries, shorts, and revived popular fare. This Sunday will be the last screening before it goes dark in anticipation of the building being razed and replaced.

When it opened in 1998, the Fine Arts created the third point in the Berkeley film lover’s triangle, with the UC Theater and the Pacific Film Archive in the Berkeley Art Museum (since moved to campus near Bowditch Street). The UC screened new film-festival picks and older classics and the PFA tended toward serious international scholarship. The Fine Arts, rounding out the triptych, offered overlooked gems trolled from the tireless festival travels of co-owner Keith Arnold and inspired double-bills of the difficult and the fluffy: a Wisconsin love-in pairing “Straight Story,” David Lynch’s dark-edged pastoral story of a man and his lawnmower, with “American Movie” and its failure-proned savant Mark Borshardt; or the recent double-feature with Humphrey Bogart’s Nazi subversion in the ageless favorite “Casablanca” with a hypothetical Nazi defeat of England in the rarely seen “It Happened Here.”

As the UC Theater proved, running a single-screen art-house theater is not easy. For four years the owners and operators of the Fine Arts Cinema – Keith Arnold, Emily Charles, and Josephine Scherer – worked their labor of love as programmers, projectionists, ticket sellers, janitors, popcorn-poppers and candy-bar stockers. Ticket sales were often so meager they would not cover the overhead.

Even so, they are not giving up even as their theater is torn down. The landlord of the building to be built on the site, Patrick Kennedy (also owner of the new Gaia building downtown), has entered an agreement with the Fine Arts Cinema to include a 7,000 square foot theater in the new building, along with museum space for the Cinema Preservation Society, a non-profit organization tangentially associated with the Fine Arts Cinema. Like the financially troubled Roxie Theater in San Francisco, non-profit status may ease the difficulties of operating an independent art cinema. The new building is expected to be completed, and the theater re-opened, in 2004. In the meantime Arnold will be taking his movies on the road, screening at various pick-up locations in the Bay Area and abroad.

For the next two years the East Bay’s discriminating moviegoers will have narrowed cinema options. Even as the Pacific Film Archive provides both challenging work (a series of Armenian documentaries this summer) and amusing classics (a month of Preston Sturges comedies in July) there will doubtless be a diaspora of die-hard film buffs toward the remaining rep-houses in San Francisco.

For their final weekend, the Fine Arts Cinema is going out as they came in: with the beautifully animated 1926 silent film “The Adventures Of Prince Achmed” in which German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger uses wonderfully intricate paper cut-out silhouettes to tell a story of magic carpets and enchanted kingdoms. A new original score will be performed live by the Georges Lammam Ensemble. It’s the kind of cinema experience Berkeley has come to expect from the Fine Arts, and will be missed in their absence.

It’s 3 p.m. in West Berkeley, and there are a dozen restless 4-year-olds at the Oceanview YMCA Head Start Program. They do their best to sit still and listen to the story being read to them, but their eyes and minds wander around the room as sunlight leaks in through a couple of windows.

The storyteller isn’t your usual preschool teacher: He’s about 6-foot-5 and barely fits in his junior-sized chair. He’s also 17 years old and sports cornrows. But Berkeley High rising senior K.K. Alexander doesn’t mind the reading time, as long as he eventually gets to stretch his legs.

When Alexander finishes the story (something about Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and a cannon), the preschoolers break out to the yard, complete with playstructure, foursquare court and picnic tables. But despite the playground equipment, the biggest attraction is Alexander and three of his fellow volunteers. The kids chase them, try to steal a basketball from their hands, and climb on them like jungle gyms. The young men are all exceptionally tall and athletic, and there’s a good reason for that: they’re the founding members of Dynasty Basketball.

Started by El Cerrito High’s Jonathon Smith and his stepfather, Berkeley High graduate and Cal Hall of Famer Gene Ransom, Dynasty Basketball is an AAU summer team for promising high school ballers. They practice several times a week and have finished in the top two in all four tournaments they’ve entered this summer. Next month, they will jet off to Las Vegas for the Adidas Big Time Tournament, the most prestigious prep basketball event in the nation. At first glance, they’re just like most other AAU teams, a collection of some of the best players in the region who are hoping to make the leap to college ball.

But Dynasty Basketball is about more than just basketball. Ransom, a former freshman coach at Berkeley High, made sure when he agreed to coach the team that the players would be committed to community service and hitting the books. Starting with Smith and boyhood friend Alexander, they recruited players from schools like St. Joseph, Kennedy, and Salesian to fill out the team.

While the players may not be the kind of stars that recruiters gossip about, they all have a chance to move on to the next level, and Ransom wants to make sure they don’t miss out.

“They asked me (to coach) because they knew I’m a coach that’s concerned with them as true student-athletes,” Ransom says. “My kids didn’t feel as if they were getting enough from their high schools. They know I’m about them, not about myself.”

Ransom coached the freshman team at Berkeley High during the 2000-01 season, but decided to step away after his proposals for study programs and community service for the players fell on deaf ears. With the budget getting tighter every year at BHS, the support system for younger players can be lacking. In fact, with the newest set of budget cuts, the freshman team has been eliminated for the upcoming school year.

So when Davis asked Ransom to help organize a team for him and his friends, Ransom jumped at the chance. While taking classes at the New College of California in San Francisco, he had written a proposal for a comprehensive program for high school athletes, complete with study sessions and community service as equal components with practice and games. Dynasty Basketball is the beginning stages of that vision.

“These kids were overlooked, and now they’re getting a chance to show how good they are,” Ransom says. “A lot of AAU teams want to stack up with known star players.”

For Smith and the other players, basketball is admittedly the main focus. But they enjoy their time at Head Start, sporting huge grins as they show off fancy dribbling moves and hoist kids over their shoulders.

“We probably practice just as much as any other AAU team, and that’s important to us,” Smith says. “But when we’re not playing, we’re doing something as a group. This lets us do something constructive with our off-time, instead of just hanging around.”

It’s hard to say who has more fun during playtime, the little kids or the big kids. Head Start Director Pam Shaw says having the players come in is the highlight of the preschoolers’ week, especially since the Head Start staff trained the players on how to interact with them.

“The kids look so forward to seeing them,” Shaw says. “It has really escalated basketball to new high among four-year-olds. It’s something you don’t really see in most programs.”

The team visits Head Start once a week, and they recently finished painting the Oceanview YMCA building. Later this summer, they will volunteer at homeless shelters, which Ransom thinks will give them some perspective on the importance of education.

“I feel this stuff makes these kids realize basketball can only go so far,” Ransom says. “When I finished school and got into coaching, I started to see how the system can take advantage of athletes. When someone is done with you, they can just throw you away. These young men have to be ready for when they aren’t playing anymore.”

Paula Gerstenblatt, mother to Smith and wife to Ransom, encouraged the two to get the program going and has been instrumental in fundraising efforts. She knew Ransom wouldn’t let the players just work on basketball all summer.

“The team gives them an opportunity to experience things that they might normally miss at this age,” Gerstenblatt says. “If you can prod them out of their little world of basketball into other things, it can only help.”

Russell Murrey

Gene Ransom 841-7835 205-3395

Tried at Berkeley High to start afterschool program, but it never materialized. So I went independent, started own AAU team.

There are kids out there with just as much talent, just lack being taught basketball skills.

They are role models, more than just players. Came up had a lot of mentors, nowadays lacking in positive mentors, just giving back what people have given to me over the years.

Resources are there, what I came to find out is that some programs are not really fro the kids as far as building character, teaching them about life as much as basketball.

Grad 75. Cal 75-78.

Paula Gerstenblatt 741-1272

agreed to coach the kids, group of parents got together, really team formed because of lack of this kind of program at HS level. What we wanted to do for our kids was provide a more nurturing experience for academic, athletic, social skills. Based on proposal Gene New College of California, proposed at BHS, plan to have kids reading and doing comm service. Used that as springboard assign book to read, do comm service as part of team requirement. Began just trying to put together team with schedule. Not familiar with AAU circuit. Fumbled way through dark. Fundraising for a fraction of costs. Garage sale, EC Honda donated money. Pooled money, four tournaments so far, taken second in three and first in one. SNJ spring league. Going to Vegas Big Time Tournament, Elite 8 at Cal.

Impetus came from how a lot of athletes are not offered a full development. 2.0 effort on court would not be tolerated. What’s blossomed has been camaraderie and friendships. 20 years from now look around and see friends that came from this. Other piece is that really fortunate to have Doug Murray SJSU HOF and Gene.

Head Start connection, some kids done comm service in their communities. Natural linkage to Berk/Alb Head Start. Gives them opp to experience things that they might miss at this age. If can prod them out of their little world of basketball into other things.

Pam Shaw Berkeley Head Start director 848-9092. 925-457-7308 cell

Fun having kids there that aren’t little kids. Takes them away from just being basketball players. Had to train them more about how to play with the kids, how to read stories. The kids really look up to them, literally and figuratively.

Mutual benefits are incredible, and kids get a chance to run wild. Our kids need everything we can give them.

Birth to five, preschool, thorugh Berk/Alb YMCA. Funded to serve close to 500 kids, now have 9 centers in east bay. focuses on kids and families, low income. Get kids ready for school.

office used to be gym, Gene played basketball here. Fond feelings, working on whole child, natural progression, inclination to do work within community.

Did apply for grant Youth Involvement, federal government, to expand program to target high school athletes. October. Try to work with coaches in area to have more kids do community service with us. Interesting target, kids often don’t do much outside of school other than athletics.

A group of four Japanese filmmakers, the latest in a recent string of Japanese peace activists to cross the Pacific and visit the anti-war hotbed, arrived last weekend to start work on a documentary tentatively titled “Democracy in Berkeley City.”

The contingent has interviewed peace activists, followed City Councilmember Kriss Worthington, taped vigils and recorded various city meetings. The filmmakers, who will wrap up their work next week, plan to show their documentary to peace organizations, political groups and students in Japan.

The documentary will touch on the Free Speech Movement and anti-war protests of the 1960s, examine the City Council’s Oct. 16 resolution calling for a speedy end to the bombing in Afghanistan and include a segment on KPFA’s activist-style radio.

But producer Osamu Kimura said Berkeley’s culture of heavy citizen involvement in politics will be at the center of the documentary.

“Our focus is citizen participation,” he said, arguing that increased grassroots activism is the key to Japanese peace activists’ latest political fight – the struggle against a series of “emergency” or “contingency” laws proposed by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

The laws would give the prime minister greater power over the media, transportation, telecommunications and local governments in the event of a military crisis.

Proponents say the laws would provide a much-needed framework in the event of a crisis, while detractors say they are reminiscent of Japan’s militaristic past.

Japanese politicians have pushed for contingency laws since the 1970s but have repeatedly failed. The Sep. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States and Japanese logistical support for the US in its military campaign in Afghanistan have given hawks new momentum.

The Japanese left has mounted several large protests against the proposed emergency laws. But in order to ensure the long-term health of the peace movement, Kimura said, Japanese activists must move beyond a culture of simple protest to one of active engagement in the political process.

“Now, we feel we do not (do enough) to concretize participation,” he said.

Steve Freedkin, a member of Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission who visited Japan in March, said Japanese activists have begun to improve participation by petitioning local governments to take stands on international issues.

The City Council’s October anti-war resolution, the filmmakers said, fit in with this strategy and attracted Japanese activists.

“Berkeley is a small city, but it’s famous,” said Jamila Takahashi, an anti-war activist from Tokyo who is traveling with the film crew.

Kimura, who has also produced a documentary on an endangered Japanese sea mammal called the dugong, said he hopes the Berkeley film will not only teach lessons about citizen participation, but broaden Japanese understanding for the political currents in the United States.

“We have news about Bush, Clinton and Nixon, but very little information about grassroots movements,” he said.

Freedkin said the Berkeley peace movement and the national movement as a whole have something to learn from the Japanese as well.

“They are much more coordinated in different cities,” Freedkin said, describing one of the primary lessons from his March trip. “There’s much more of a unified movement in Japan. That’s something we can learn.”

There was an article 5/13/02 from Kevin Zwick regarding AHA senior housing project for the city of Berkeley. This is a letter I have sent to Senators Boxer and Feinstein and congressman Miller regarding my experiences as an apartment renter in Pleasant Hill.

After one year my rent was increased by $200, financial support for Hookston Senior Apartments was no longer forthcoming. Yes, the property had been repaired, fixed, etc....and then the elderly became expendable. What else is new regarding the elderly? I wonder who made lots and lots of money on that deal?

AARP came through with a temporary job for me and I was fortunate in finding a place in Berkeley that I could afford. AHA is Affable Housing so I keep it discreet but quite frankly I am skeptical and mistrusting about anything they repair and fix up for those in need. I believe we pay for their fixing and when they're through they make lots of money and we are out on our tails trying to survive. I wish to underline that those who are out of luck in this situation are good people, some blind, some wheelchair bound, some who have just had a little bad luck.

There is a moment in the new documentary “The Cockettes” when co-director Bill Weber edited a montage sequence of several former members of the legendary drag theatrical troupe remembering when their first show took place. Some are certain it was on Halloween. Others are absolutely sure it was on New Year’s Eve. The jovial moment of memory discrepancy laughs at a central question posed to the craft of historical documentary: if all the participants were too stoned to remember, do details matter?

The moment is also one where the otherwise formally crafted film loosens up a bit.

Filmmakers David Weissman and Bill Weber have tried to construct a film that would make sense of a group of people who celebrated chaos. Their subject – a band of hippie freaks and drag queens in San Francisco circa 1970 who put on stage shows using cabaret-style music and dance numbers to catapult an anarchy of off-key notes, thrift-store dresses, a cacophony of gender-bending free love, and more than their fair share of psychedelics into a moment of national fame that tweaked the hypothalamus of pop culture to come – had all the structure of a love-in.

But for most of the Cockettes, once dizzy with spontaneous creativity and energy, the party couldn’t last forever.

Watching the film, one is struck by the difference between the Cockettes now and then; between the straight-looking homeowners with haircuts and tailored clothes alongside archival images of Dionysian, grease-painted, Salvation Army nymphs with glitter in their pubic hair.

One of the principal songwriters and arrangers, Scrumbly (aka Richard Kolewyn) still remembers the Cockettes songs. Sitting at the piano of the music room of his home on 59th Street in North Oakland, surrounded by bookshelves filled with sheet music and Cole Porter books, he accompanied Sweet Pam (aka Pam Tent) doing “Divorcee’s Lament.”

Scrumbly is now a professional musician performing in local cabaret and musical theater shows. Sweet Pam, who once opened for the New York Dolls and the Ramones, now works at a local lumber company, and she can still sell a lyric (“…Reno, I want to be free!”).

Even if they don’t sport vintage 1930’s costumes discovered in diligent thrift-store expeditions, once a Cockette, always a Cockette. “I still like to troll thrift stores, and I don’t need to shop there anymore,” said Sweet Pam, who attended the premier of “The Cockettes” at Sundance with a suitcase full of second-hand clothes. “Now it’s difficult. But here in Oakland you can still get good deals. It’s amazing. Even go further, go to San Leandro.”

“But you can’t get anything from the 30’s,” said Scrumbly.

“Oh, yes you can,” Pam corrected him.

“Well," sneered Scrumbly, “I guess I haven’t been to San Leandro in a while.”

“Exactly. The dear ladies at the Treasure Hospice.”

The film is now enjoying its premiere engagement in Bay Area theaters and will have an exclusive broadcast on the Sundance channel on June 21 before its national theatrical release. It is chock-a-block with dazzling archival footage of the Cockettes in full fabulous regalia, but the Cockettes would not take pictures of themselves.

“Everyone was so in the moment we didn’t think to record for posterity,” Sweet Pamsaid.

Instead, photographers of the day sought them out. Annie Liebowitz, Mary Allen Mark, Bud Lee and others donated their 30 year-old negatives to the filmmakers. What developed was more than an homage to the free spirit of makeup and tattered dresses; the film delivers an image of alternative living in 60’s San Francisco that is rarely seen, one made up of serious revolutionary fervor alongside the pursuit of unmitigated joy bordering on insanity. It has been described as the plaids versus the sequins.

“The plaid meant you were the unadorned individual, like no lipstick for women. No lipstick, no bra. Back-to-nature and paring everything down to the simplest things,” Scrumbly explained. “The idea that you could dress up and not spend any money was what a few people discovered. It was like discovering glam all over again.”

When the Cockettes started taking their wardrobe to the stage in 1970, the people came. The in-crowd crowded the Palace Theater in San Francisco’s North Beach to watch their overwhelming energy transcend theatrical chaos.

“We were not against traditional theater,” said Scrumbly. “What we were doing was to be in the moment.”

“The audience was our peers. Half of them were stoned,” Pam remembered. “They didn’t come to see a professional show. They came to have a party.”

“Yeah, it’s like a big party and a few brave souls get up there in front of everybody and do some crazy, funny things. And sometimes it was really good funny, and sometimes it was just stupid. And that was good, too.”

Their shows caught the attention of the national media, and eventually the hipster glitterati of New York. They were invited to perform a three-week run in New York and they were the toast of the town, until the night of the first show. The theater was too large, the songs were unrehearsed, and the previously adoring audience turned away from the ragged San Francisco hippies.

“The hype was unsurpassed,” Scrumbly said.

“And some people believed the hype,” added Pam.

“It was easy to believe because we were being treated like royalty, like only New York can when they think you’re the new thing.”

But New York didn’t want what the Cockettes were offering. The Cockettes’ Big Apple run eventually found the audience it needed, but the initial flop highlighted the difference between counter-culture living in NY versus that in SF.

“One was heroin and one was LSD,” laughed Scrumbly. “Hippie was meaningless in New York at that point.”

“They were a tougher stock. We were very much a family,” Pam said. “Despite our differences we were a family of freaks. They were very much individuals and glamour queens.”

“Certainly a lot of people gravitated with us. It was a great party with the NY freaks. It was really fun.”

“We were so happy. We were just idiotically happy,” Sweet Pam chirped. “It didn’t translate well. That joie-de-vivre from the West Coast somehow fell flat on the stage. It wasn’t professional enough.”

“Well, of course,” Scrumbly assented.

After the New York debacle, the film’s enthusiasm for the Cockettes diminished, setting up the viewers for the coming dissolution of the group, and the film’s final act. In reality the Cockettes returned from New York rejuvenated by everything they had experienced there. They continued to put on sell-out shows in San Francisco with no less energy and revitalized creativity.

“The first show after NY was “Les Etoiles de Paris,” which was one of the most artistically gorgeous shows,” said Sweet Pam.

“The stage was the top of a vanity,” Scrumbly said, remembering the oversized perfume bottles, combs, and other objects d’toilet. “I sang ‘Jewels of Paris’ and out came bathing beauties with gigantic jewels on their heads. And we had 5 Edith Piafs. 5 Maurice Chevaliers.”

“And the shows were still selling out,” Sweet Pam recalled. “The last show was at the House of Good, Jim Jones’ temple – way before the massacre. We did the Miss Demeanor Beauty Pageant. Divine was there [the famous corpulent drag queen from Baltimore featured in John Water’s films] and she won.”

“No, she was last year’s Miss Demeanor,” Scrumbly corrected.

“That’s right. And Goldie won.”

Scrumbly corrected again. “No, China White won.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well, I was on less drugs, I guess.”

Eventually the Cockettes ended. Key people left and others continued performing together under different names. Although they may be somewhat less glittery than they were, filmmaerk Bill Wever said the personalities of the former Cockettes were amazingly intact.

“There is only no Cockette left if you deny ever being one,” Scrumbly beamed.

YOKOHAMA, Japan – Africans again opened a World Cup with a monumental upset.

Rekindling memories of one of the continent’s greatest soccer triumphs 12 years earlier, Senegal frustrated defending champion France with a tight defense and flawless goalkeeping. The World Cup newcomers made a 30th-minute goal from Papa Bouba Diop stand for a 1-0 victory that sparked dancing in the streets back home in Dakar.

Not that Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade was surprised. He predicted victory for his upstarts, who matched the feat of Cameroon in 1990, when it beat Argentina 1-0.

“They learned their trade, their technique, the science of football in France,” Wade said. “They have come to Senegal’s side, a little like an apprentice who learned his lesson well, and now faces his master.”

And beats the master, which looked tentative without injured star Zinedine Zidane. The hero of the 1998 championship is sidelined with a torn thigh muscle.

Still, nothing can minimize Senegal’s achievement. Not the French shots that hit the posts and crossbar, or went directly at goalkeeper Tony Sylva. Not the nervousness the favorites displayed.

Nothing.

“Today’s victory is a victory for all of Africa and Senegal,” Diop said. “No one expected that Senegal will beat France. But we did.”

Senegal certainly wouldn’t mind repeating Cameroon’s showing at Italia ’98. Cameroon went to the quarterfinals, becoming the most successful African team in the World Cup.

Argentina recovered to reach the final, as France still could do.

“We take comfort from the fact that nothing’s finished,” coach Roger Lemerre said. “There are two more matches to win. If we can win, we’ll have six points and we’ll be through.”

The first World Cup in Asia — and the first to be divided between two countries — opened with fireworks, traditional dance, high-tech displays and bristling security.

Japan, the co-host with South Korea, was represented at opening ceremonies by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Prince Takamado, a cousin of the emperor and first member of Japan’s royal family to visit Korea since the end of Japanese rule there in 1945.

South Korea hoped Emperor Akihito himself would attend, but Japan worried about lingering hostility after war and occupation. The emperor is to attend the final June 30 in Yokohama.

When recently re-elected FIFA president Sepp Blatter spoke at the opening, he was jeered by some of the 64,640 in the stands.

You can take “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance but you can't take yourself out from under god. Big Brother rules.

He has deceived all the nations (Rev. 12:9), father of lies, god of this world. Orwell's “1984” should have been called“3990 BC - 2010 AD.”

The last time a nation was under God with a capital "G" was Judah when the Jews returned from Babylon under Ezra and Zerubbabel. Israel, the 10 northern tribes which the US and Britain came from, hasn't been under God from the beginning of its existence after the death of King Solomon. We don't even keep the sabbath, one of the 10 Commandments. The greatest country on earth and we don't know who we are in the Bible.

So you have freedom of religion?

You can have any religion you want but you're all under the same god, the god of disinformation. I pledge my allegiance to God. He's going to send a special messenger with the truth – a prophet like Elijah who is going to turn hearts back to the real God.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Most of them were born a decade or two after Elvis Presley died. But the kids watching Disney’s new “Lilo & Stitch” at a screening in Memphis got a chuckle when the small blue space alien Stitch did an Elvis impersonation in a white jumpsuit.

And that made the folks from Graceland happy, too.

“We’re going to have millions of young kids discovering Elvis and asking their parents if they’ve ever heard of this guy,” said Jack Soden, president of Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc.

It’s a big year for Graceland, the center of a multimillion-dollar business owned by Elvis’ sole heir, Lisa Marie Presley. Aug. 16 is the 25th anniversary of Presley’s death in 1977 at the Memphis mansion, and he is already getting new attention.

This week, RCA Records released a version of his 1968 “A Little Less Conversation” to radio and commercial outlets. “Elvis vs. JXL — a Little Less Conversation,” remixed into a techno groove by Junkie XL, has already hit No. 1 in Britain.

Also this week, RCA/BMG Heritage released a four-CD box set, “Elvis: Today, Tomorrow & Forever,” with 100 previously unreleased tracks, mostly alternate takes of lesser-known material. And an album of Elvis’ 30 No. 1 hits is due out in September.

As for “Lilo & Stitch,” it was not planned to coincide with the Elvis anniversary. Disney came to Graceland more than two years ago with the idea of including Elvis music in the movie.

“Then they began weaving Elvis more and more into the movie and it became a multi-tier series of permissions and licenses, and of course we were getting more excited by the minute,” Soden said.

Presley’s music runs throughout the animated movie. Lilo is a lonely young girl in Hawaii who consoles herself with Elvis records that belonged to her deceased parents. She has no friends until she adopts Stitch, the mischievous alien she thinks is a dog.

The movie opened Friday, and there was an invitation-only show the night before in Memphis, followed by an elaborate luau at Graceland put on by Disney.

Hula dancers, Hawaiian torches and banquet tables with thatched roofs greeted the more than 600 guests, who included business associates of Graceland and Disney and their families.

“The day we decided to use Elvis music in the movie we didn’t think we would be here celebrating at Graceland,” said Dean DeBlois, co-writer and director of the film.

Eight Elvis songs are in the movie, and making Lilo an Elvis fan helped round out her character, DeBlois said.

“It would make her a little different from other girls her age today who are listening to the latest pop bands,” he said. “We have one scene where Lilo is alone. She’s lonely and feeling kind of sorry for herself so we picked ’Heartbreak Hotel’ for that one.”

Presley made three movies in Hawaii and staged two of his best-known concerts there: a benefit for the USS Arizona in 1961 and “Aloha From Hawaii” in 1973.

DeBlois and his partner, Chris Sanders, got a private tour of Graceland. One long hallway is lined with Presley’s gold and platinum records.

“I turned one time and I was right at ’Blue Hawaii.’ I couldn’t believe it,” Sanders said. “I walked a couple of feet and there was ’Rock-A-Hula.”’

The St. Mary’s High administration will name a new boys’ head basketball coach on Monday, Athletic Director Jay Lawson confirmed Friday.

Lawson declined to identify the new coach on Friday, as an official announcement won’t be released until after the weekend, but did say the hire is from outside the current staff and will also teach Spanish, the same position held by former coach Jose Caraballo. That eliminates former assistant coach Mark Olivier, who was one of the four finalists for the job. Olivier confirmed his plan to take over the head coaching job at Hercules High next season.

Lawson also said Friday that the school’s staff had met with most of the returning players, and all affirmed their plan to stay at St. Mary’s.

For Don Donahue, leaving the “Warehouse” at 2750 Adeline Street, a south Berkeley artist’s cooperative, would be a challenge. If an eviction dispute is not resolved, Donahue faces the task of moving an immense collection of art and more than 26 years worth of underground comic books.

As a publisher of alternative comic books, poetry and literature since the 1960’s, Donahue, along with many Berkeley residents and city officials is concerned that too many local artists are being forced out of the city.

“A lot of people have come and gone, artists, musicians. Somehow I’ve always stayed here. Every time I almost moved out I always ended up staying,” reflected Donahue.

Despite the fact that they have all been issued eviction notices, the residents at 2750 Adeline Street hope that theirs will be a success story.

According to Natasha Shawver, a resident of the building for the past 19 years, the city of Berkeley has taken notice of the cooperative’s situation and shown support. “I never thought in a million years the city would listen to us,” said Shawver. “They’ve shown a lot of effort. They’ve really backed us up.”

The City Council voted unanimously in April to temporarily waive thousands of dollars in fees if the artists are able to buy the building, and temporarily waive the retrofitting timeline on the site.

According to Councilmember Kriss Worthington, a supporter of the cooperative, the City Manager has assigned several people to assist the tenants in their communication with the building’s landlord, Sasha Shamszad. “Several city departments including the housing department are working on this and we hope for a ‘win-win’ situation,” says Worthington.

Shamszad, the owner of Ziba Photographics in Berkeley and San Francisco, did not comment on the case, citing instructions from his lawyer.

“This is not an isolated instance. There is a pattern of artists being forced from their studios. We need to get the landlords and the tenants to work together,” added Worthington.

The city is currently examining a number of tenant buildings which face similar eviction cases, specifically in the arts and crafts district in west Berkeley.

A collection of old pinball machines, original artwork and comic books greet visitors as they enter 2750 Adeline Street, representing the unique and creative personalities within the house.

Residents at the cooperative emphasize that their building is a part of the larger community. Shawver, who’s toy store was open to the public for 10 years until 1996, says she has a relationship with the community. “I’m connected to the community. I see people at the grocery store and around town and get their feedback. There hasn’t been one person who hasn’t been supportive of us,” said Shawver.

“We’ve seen people grow up here,” said Donahue.

According to Rosita Fogelman, a graphic artist originally from Israel and resident of the cooperative for the past four years, a creative vein runs throughout the building. “It’s a great place to get inspiration, once you’ve got it just comes out,” says Fogelman.

Fogelman, who was attracted to Berkeley’s reputation as a center for art and culture, says she hopes an agreement can be reached between the residents and the current landlord. “We want a deal to work out. Our hope is to keep this place and to keep it open to the community,” says Fogelman.

Fogelman notes that the previous landlord, Tim Baker, worked hard to keep the building affordable for the tenants. “He wanted artists who would participate in the community. If we had more owners like that we’d have a happier town,” says Fogelman.

Residents of 2750 Adeline Street plan to run a series of art shows outside the building this August and be included in the Berkeley Art Festival. According to Shawver, the cooperative hopes to include an eclectic and funky display of artwork at the shows and focus on involving community participation in the shows.

According to Shawver, the remaining six residents do not want to vilify their landlord. They hope, rather, to work with Shamszad to find a middle ground.

“We feel we have an insight into the community, that we have a unique opportunity to be helpful,” said Shawver.

Today the county Board of Supervisors takes on the Isla Vista party scene. The board will consider giving law enforcement more powers to break up social gatherings and cite party-goers for unruly behavior. Isla Vista’s rowdiness could stand to be taken down a few notches. Officers documented 2,900 alcohol-related crimes in I.V. in 2001.

Yet the county proposals, when considered along with (University of California, Santa Barbara’s) plans to notify parents when their undergraduate sons or daughter are arrested or cited for public intoxication, raise questions about fairness, civil liberties and privacy protections

Residents, students, business owners and law enforcement officers shouldn’t miss sharing their thoughts ...(about) an ordinance that would let officers declare a gathering a public nuisance.

Among the new rules: Parties could be shut down if officers see beer kegs from the sidewalk. Officers could send everyone home and write citations to people who refuse. This provision, unfairly, would only apply to I.V. and not other unincorporated areas.

Separate from the county, UCSB wants to notify parents when undergraduates are cited or arrested for public intoxication. But remember arrest does not prove guilt.

UCSB’s scheme relies on an outdated notion of family. Many students may be estranged from one or both of their parents. An appeals process might allow a student to ask that a letter not be sent to a particular parent. Yet this would mean that UCSB would compel a student not convicted of any crime to disclose private family matters to government employees.

———

May 21

Visalia Times Delta: Farmworkers also need leverage to negotiate contracts

Farm labor negotiations are typically difficult, and California has a long history of contentious relations between management and labor in agriculture.

Given that history and the frequency by which farmworkers have been thwarted simply by being stonewalled, it seems fair to provide a tool for workers to get growers to bargain in good faith.

A bill in the Legislature would mandate binding arbitration to end impasses over contract negotiations. It would apply only to farmers whose workers have voted to organize.

Agriculture management is against it. The state Farm Bureau complains that it would inflict a labor requirement on agriculture that no other business is subject to.

The United Farm Workers union contends that the provision would not even be necessary if growers bargained with them in good faith, but the union cites dozens of instances where growers refused to sign or live up to a contract.

Binding arbitration can be an important incentive to both sides to come to an agreement. It in effect puts the proceedings on the clock and guarantees there will be a resolution. Farm workers have traditionally been stymied by stalling tactics or simply by having growers walk away from the table, hire another group of workers and start over.

We can understand the objections of growers, however, operating as they do in a business with a very narrow margin.

The solution for both sides, of course, is an adjustment of the basic agriculture economy: Growers should be able to pay farm laborers more. To do that, they need to get more for their produce. When consumers un-derstand they have a role to play in that, too, maybe real reform can take place and some of the tension will go out of grower-worker relations.

xYou may expect that a new book called “Chez Panisse Fruit” by Alice Waters, the world-famous chef and owner of Berkeley's own Chez Panisse restaurant, is all about fruit. Well, you'd be half-right. Waters will be the first to tell you that it's really about “how to think about food put in the context of fruit.”

Waters, who spoke about her new book at Cody's Books on Fourth Street on May 29, said that her book is more about how to get connected with food and the people who grow it.

“I support the people at the farmer's markets — I go rain or shine,” she said. “Their produce and fruit makes what the restaurant is today. It's a great feeling to have this support, care and community with them.”

“Chez Panisse Fruit,” which is Waters' eighth book and was written in conjunction with the cooks from the restaurant, has more than 300 pages featuring more than 200 recipes. Those recipes cover the gamut on every imaginable dish, from waffles to salads and from stews to pork loin, all with fruit as the centerpiece. But one of the main accents are the desserts, which range from tarts and jams to crisps and ice cream — including a recipe for huckleberry ice cream. Different fruits break down the sections. With each new fruit comes a note about when it's in season along with an essay about the origins of that particular fruit, how to select it store and of course prepare it.

“Eighty-five percent of cooking is finding the right ingredient,” said Waters to crowd of more than 50 people. “The focus has to be on the farmer and that farmer is taking care of the fruit and produce.”

Waters, who said she deals with about 75 producers of fruit and vegetables year round, said that the book could be a great companion on trips to local farmer's markets. She said that all of the fruit on the menu at Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971, is only fruit that's in season. Currently, it's strawberry season she said, so if you go to a local farmer's market or into Chez Panisse, those are going to be the main ingredients that you see.

“Our restaurant is not run in the usual way-in the pyramid way with the cook on top looking down,” she said. “We're more like an improvisational music group. We follow the person's lead who is most enthusiastic. They decide what to cook based on what was brought in that day.”

Food changes as soon as it's picked, said Waters, who also said that she and her chefs travel to a local farmer in Sonoma five days a week to get fresh fruits and vegetables, many times bringing the compost from the restaurant to give back to the farmer. It's understanding what the fruit looks like and tastes like, along with the ability to make changes on the fly that make great dishes.

A graduate from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in French cultural studies, Waters said that when she travels and goes to restaurants, she always wants to eat what's grown locally.

“But it's very difficult to do this because of global trade,” she said. “We must insist on getting fresh, local produce.”

A good tip to try and figure out what's in season when eating out, is to go to the marketplace and see what's in season there, then go the restaurant and ask for that.

“It's all about supporting the people who grow and giving money directly to the people involved with growing. It's about making choices like this which is going to change the world,” she said.

During a question and answer period at the end of her discussion, Waters also gave insight on her views about her philosophy of being committed to organic, locally grown food and how that could be taught in schools.

“We need to educate through the public school system, around the school lunch program,” she said. “We need to teach students how to feed themselves and about where food comes from. It's about getting kids involved in the process of picking the fruit and vegetables.”

Waters, who started the Chez Panisse Foundation to underwrite culture and education programs, currently helps children maintain a garden at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. One of her other suggestions involves getting the whole school involved in food, from having the biology teacher hold a lab in the garden, to English teachers getting students to write recipes from certain historical periods or try to make food in relation to what they're studying.

In addition to her discussion, a showcase of local artist Patricia Curtan, whose lithographs and illustrations are featured in the book, were on display. According to literature from Cody's Books, Curtan has a long association with Chez Panisse as a printer, designer, former cook, and is a cookbook co-author and designer. Her collection can be viewed at the location on Fourth Street from May 15 through June 2.

BRIDGEPORT– A member of the San Jose State University men’s basketball team was found dead at the bottom of a waterfall near Mammoth Lakes, the victim of an apparent accidental death according to investigators.

James Jenkins, 19, of La Crescenta, was on a hiking trip Wednesday with his father. After the pair became separated, Horace Jenkins reported his son missing.

The cause of death was under investigation Friday by the Mono County coroner’s office.

Jenkins was a 6-foot-7 walk-on forward for the Spartans. He played in 30 of the team’s 32 games last season, averaging 1.8 points and 1.5 rebounds.

“In the short time I’ve known James, he is one of the finest young men I’ve known. This is devastating news to us here at San Jose State and, obviously, to his family,” said men’s basketball head coach Phil Johnson.

Jenkins was a 2001 graduate of Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, Calif. where he lettered in basketball and swimming.

Victim was apparently,‘in the wrong place at thewrong time’ police said

Flowers and photographs marked the spot where Roysel Marshall-Darrow was stabbed to death Wednesday evening. Family and friends gathered at the site on Haste Street near Telegraph Avenue to remember the man they called a good father, son, husband and friend. They made a small, temporary memorial against the outside wall of Rochdale UC co-op, and told stories about the gregarious man they knew.

All in attendance said Marshall-Darrow was a person unlikely to be involved in a violent altercation.

A stranger stabbed Marshall-Darrow three times while he was putting money into a parking meter on the 2400 block of Haste Street, police and witnesses said. Police arrested a suspect, but say they don’t know whyMarshall-Darrow was murdered.

“A motive hasn’t been determined,” said Berkeley police Lt. Ed McBride. “It appeared the victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Lamar Mitchell, 23, of Pittsburgh is in police custody under suspicion of the stabbing. An arraignment originally set for Friday was rescheduled for Tuesday.

Lt. McBride said the attacker approached Marshall-Darrow on the north side of Haste Street. Marshall-Darrow turned from the attacker before being stabbed repeatedly: once in the heart, once in the side and one time in the arm.

Marshall-Darrow was taken to Highland Hospital in Oakland and pronounced dead upon arrival. He died as a result of stab wounds to his chest, said Supervising Coroner Frank Gentle of the Alameda County Coroner’s Office.

Marshall-Darrow, 41, was born in Berkeley. Friend Gavin Housch said that he loved Telegraph Avenue and enjoyed getting coffee there periodically, including when he attended U.C. Berkeley twenty years ago. He lived in a home in Hamet in Southern California with his wife and three children and commuted to Northern California a couple of times a month to work. He was a trained electrician who worked as a power lineman for San Francisco Muni. A memorial is scheduled 3 p.m. Sunday at the Rose Garden in Berkeley.

I’m sorry people are so offended by the desire of atheists and agnostics to be recognized as a legitimate and welcome part of the national fabric, as loyal citizens, and as worthy of the same respect that people of different faiths profess to pay each other.

I’m sick of being assumed by many to lack ethics because I don't believe in God. I love and care for my family and friends. I respect and look out for my neighbors and fellow community members. I believe in democracy and I vote regularly. I work, volunteer, and practice random acts of kindness.

Godless does not equal amoral. This ruling is long overdue. I don't undersand the controversey.

Do we have separation of church and state or don't we? Are those of us who don't believe in God equal citizens or aren't we?

NEW YORK – The two surviving members of The Who decided Friday to resume their scheduled three-month U.S. tour despite the sudden death of bassist John Entwistle, their bandmate of nearly four decades.

“The band decided to recommence the tour beginning at the Hollywood Bowl (a Monday night show),” according to a message posted on guitarist Pete Townshend’s Web site.

The first show will serve as “a tribute to John Entwistle,” the band said in a separate statement.

Pino Palladino, a British session player who has worked on Townshend’s solo projects, will fill in for Entwhistle, the Web site said. The band intends to complete the full tour, and will reschedule two dates postponed after the death.

The band’s name will be the same, but it won’t be the same Who.

Whenever the band took the stage, Roger Daltrey provided the sound and Townshend the fury. Off to the side, frozen except for the fingers flying across his fretboard, stood “The Ox” — Entwistle.

Entwistle, a player of restraint in a band of excess, died Thursday of an apparent heart attack at a Las Vegas hotel. An autopsy was scheduled in Las Vegas to determine the exact cause of death, with the results of blood and lab tests expected to take two to 12 weeks, said Clark County Coroner Ron Flud.

But Las Vegas authorities said there was no sign of trauma, no sign of violence and no drug paraphernalia in Entwistle’s hotel room. There was no word on funeral arrangements, and Entwistle’s family issued a call for privacy.

Entwistle, who was on medication for a heart condition, was 57. Thirty-eight of those years were spent with The Who, which he co-founded as a London teen.

Entwistle was “probably the most influential bassist in rock music,” said rock critic Bruce Eder of the All Music Guide. Total Guitar magazine named him as bassist of the millennium in 2000, selecting Entwistle over contemporaries Paul McCartney of the Beatles, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin.

“The quietest man in private but the loudest onstage,” Wyman said of his late friend. “He was unique and irreplaceable.”

Entwistle’s death came one day before the band was scheduled to open its tour in Las Vegas. That show was postponed, along with a second show set for Saturday night in Irvine, Calif.

Fans in Las Vegas turned out at The Joint, the 1,800-seat theater where The Who had been scheduled to perform. The Who movie “Quadrophenia” was playing instead.

By Ronald Blum
The Associated Press
By Ronald Blum, The Associated Press

Saturday June 01, 2002

YOKOHAMA, Japan – What a time and place for the first World Cup meeting between Brazil and Germany — in the final, for the trophy, with all the world watching.

“We have been looking for this game for so many years in Brazil,” said Carlos Alberto Parreira, who coached his nation to the 1994 title. “I would say that the hierarchy has been restored by this Germany-Brazil final.”

Brazil has won four World Cup titles and Germany three. Of the 12 World Cup finals since World War II, 11 have included one of those two nations, with Argentina’s 1978 victory over the Netherlands the only exception.

“Both teams have a great tradition,” Brazilian forward Rivaldo said. “If Brazil wants to be champions, we have to respect Germany. Not fear them, respect them.”

Germany won its semifinal, 1-0 over co-host South Korea on Tuesday in Seoul. Brazil did its part a night later, defeating Turkey 1-0 in Saitama to match the Germans of 1982, 1986 and 1990 as the only nation to make the final three straight times.

“Brazil is the best you can get,” said Oliver Kahn, Germany’s brilliant goalkeeper. “Individually, they have world-class players at every position. But the sum of best individuals doesn’t necessarily make the best team and I think we can beat them. My gut feeling tells me that we are going to be the world champions, but I can’t explain why.”

It’s an unlikely time for the teams’ first World Cup meeting. Both nations struggled in qualifying and were considered by some long shots even to reach the quarterfinals.

Brazil was just 9-6-3 in qualifying — unheard of mediocrity in the land of samba soccer — getting in only with a victory over lowly Venezuela in its final game. Germany needed to beat Ukraine in a playoff to make it.

“Nobody really expected us to even go to the round of 16,” Germany coach Rudi Voeller said.

Brazil won the title in 1958, 1962, 1970 and 1994, earning praise much of the time for its stylish attacks. West Germany captured the championship in 1954, 1974 and 1990, sometimes criticized for its lack of imagination — and ability to flop in front of officials to gain unwarranted penalty kicks.

There’s little doubt which style most fans prefer. At its best, Brazilian soccer is a painter’s palette. At its worst, German soccer is a wrecking ball, shattering opponents with brute strength and bland-but-effective relentlessness.

“Despite the criticisms that were leveled at us because of the lack of style, lack of flair, in actual fact we implemented the coach’s instructions,” Germany’s Michael Ballack said after the semifinal win.

Ballack, who scored the only goals in the quarterfinal against the United States and in the semifinal, will miss Sunday’s game while serving a suspension for getting two yellow cards. Brazil seems supremely confident going in.

“It will be a match between the most attacking team and the most defensive team, who has only given away one goal,” Brazil’s Roberto Carlos said. “The game will focus on the defensive tactics.”

In the past decade, the nations have met five times, with Brazil going 3-1-1. Brazil won 2-1 in a 1998 game in Germany, then routed an under-strength German team 4-0 in Mexico at the 1999 FIFA Confederations Cup.

Berkeley’s city government is about to get a breath of fresh air with the appointment of three students to the energy, labor, and human welfare commissions. Councilmember Chris Worthington, who selected the students, said plenty of seats are still available for qualified applicants. Worthington’s District 7 is teeming with a resource outside the jurisdiction of other councilmembers’—the UC Berkeley campus, a veritable hive of young men and women looking to make a difference in their immediate and global community. Worthington said that though some of his recent appointees lack experience, their enthusiasm and intelligence qualify them for the job.

“I'm always trying to encourage more young people to get involved in city government. Some young kids may not have 20 years experience, but they have good ideas,” said Worthington. “Some people appoint people who volunteer and give money to their election campaigns. I try to do outreach to the community. I try to treat it as merit based, rather than political patronage,” he added.

According to Councilmember Miriam Hawley, not all councilmembers should be

expected to select students.

“There's been talk about how everybody has to appoint students and minorities,” said Hawley. “I'm helping to appoint people that represent my district — my district has a tiny potion of students and a relatively small amount of minorities. I don't appoint students unless they're particularly active, so Kriss Worthington should appoint them,” she said.

There are currently openings for the commission on the aging and the solid waste management commission in Hawley’s District 5.

Peter Tadao Gee, a 20 year-old sophomore, with a double major in Rhetoric and Ethnic studies was selected by Worthington to serve on the Labor Commission. Last summer Gee worked in Los Angeles for the Korean Immigrant Worker Advocate, a community organization seeking to improve labor rights for immigrants in the service industry. Involved with the Korean Town restaurant Worker Campaign, Gee helped improve the working conditions in downtown Los Angeles' Korean restaurants.

“Seeing those issues, and how workers were being exploited concerned me,” said Gee. “I felt there needed to be stronger support, and better working conditions for immigrant workers,” he said.

Gee hopes his presence on the nine person commission will offer Berkeley a fresh perspective, and that his constituency will see him as a resource and channel to the labor commission and city council.

Some upcoming agenda items he hopes to discuss with his colleagues include the day laborer issue, and U.C. Berkeley's treatment of their service employees.

“Berkeley is one of the largest employers in Northern California, and I'd like to make sure their laborers are treated fairly, and present a voice for those workers on general working class issues.”

Jorge Guzman, a 20 year-old junior studying Political Science and Sociology, was selected to serve on the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission.

And while Guzman acknowledges his lack of experience in city government, he recognizes he has to start somewhere.

“I wanted to see how the city works, and thought the position would be a good introduction to city politics,” said Guzman. “The other guys had so much experience, it's nice that [Worthington] let me in,” he added. Guzman said he hopes to help bridge the gap between Berkeley’s Latino residents and the City Council. “I know allot of Latinos are not involved in city politics. There are allot in the city, but few on the council. It could be a language issue, so that's one way I could get involved.”

Nicole Hopper was selected to serve on the Energy Commission could not be reached for comment. In District 7 there are presently seven vacancies available on the Waterfront, Arts, Early Childhood Education, Fire, Peace and Justice commissions.

Nutrition activist Joy Moore made it official this week: She will not run for the Board of Education.

Moore, a community outreach worker, expressed strong interest in running earlier this year, but said this week she will not pursue office.

“There’s enough people running,” she said, referring to the seven candidates who have declared for the three slots on the board up for election in November.

When Moore publicly expressed interest in April, only four candidates had entered the race.

The field now includes incumbents Shirley Issel and Terry Doran, parent activists Nancy Riddle, Derick Miller and Cynthia Papermaster, Berkeley High School discipline dean Robert McKnight and recent BHS graduate Sean Dugar.

Moore, who serves on the Child Nutrition Advisory Committee, a parent group which advises the board, said she will actively support “a candidate or two” in the race. One of those candidates, she said, will be Doran. Moore has not decided on any others.

In April, Moore, who is African-American, raised child nutrition and racial diversity on the board as key issues. This week she said the emergence of two African-American candidates, McKnight and Dugar, had allayed some of her concerns about an adequate minority presence on the board.

But, Moore said she hopes some Latino candidates step forward.

“I don’t think Latinos have representation on the board right now,” she said, in a swipe at board Vice-President Joaquin Rivera.

“I’ve tried to do my best,” Rivera replied.

Rivera’s seat is not up for election this year. School board member John Selawsky does not face re-election either.

There is talk of installing Santa Rosa lights at Adeline and Fairview, because of the recent death there. But there is a much more effective alternative: Hawk lights.

Hawk lights, used in Tucson, are similar to ordinary traffic lights. They are mounted on poles and masts, and when a pedestrian or bicyclist activates them, they turn yellow and then red, stopping traffic so people can cross.

Santa Rosa lights are embedded in the crosswalk, where they are less visible, and they flash to warn cars that a pedestrian is crossing.

It costs $40,000 to install Hawk lights at an intersection, a bit more than the $35,000 that it costs for Santa Rosa lights.

But Hawk lights are much more effective than Santa Rosa lights. Virtually all drivers stop for Hawk lights, because they look like red traffic lights.

Many drivers don't stop for Santa Rosa lights, because people do not know that flashing lights at ground level mean they should stop.

Santa Rosa lights are particularly ineffective during the day, when they are less visible, so they probably would not have stopped the recent death at Adeline and Fairview.

LOS ANGELES – Two University of California students deported from Israel after trying to provide humanitarian aid to armed Palestinians during a church standoff in Bethlehem said they were only trying to protect them from injury or arrest.

Robert O’Neill, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student from Claremont, and Nauman Zaidi, a 26-year-old UC Riverside student from Rancho Cucamonga, returned to the United States on Monday.

The two students were among 10 pro-Palestinian activists who rushed past Israeli soldiers earlier this month and joined Palestinians who sought refuge in the church.

Both men said they were trying to end the seige peacefully and not prolong it.

“We saw it as almost black and white,” said O’Neill, who spoke with the Los Angeles Times in a recent phone interview. “Regardless of anyone’s political views, these people were starving. They were suffering and somebody had to do something.”

Israeli officials believe the students’ actions risked the lives of other people inside the church and helped militant Palestinians.

“They broke Israeli law, they aided terrorists in what became a major standoff, and they put at risk the lives of innocent people,” said David Douek, spokesman for the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles. “It’s a serious offense; it’s not like they were shoplifting.”

Zaidi and O’Neill were removed from the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank on May 10 as the standoff between armed Palestinians and Israeli soldiers ended after 39 days. Both spent more than two weeks in Israeli custody following the end of the siege.

Zaidi and O’Neill were studying in Egypt when they entered the church. UC officials said the two have been dropped from the overseas program for violating the university’s rules by putting themselves in danger. Both men said they plan to return to their home campuses this fall to complete their undergraduate degrees.

Zaidi said he learned on his trip that both Israelis and Palestinians want peace but they have been unable to reach common ground.

“It’s sad. Both people want peace, but they’re scared of each other, for obvious reasons. They don’t know how to get there. We were trying to help,” he said.

O’Neill hopes to work for the U.S. State Department and try to change the country’s policy in the Middle East.

“I think I could initiate a lot of change,” he said. “If every American just knew the realities on the ground over there, about what happens to the Palestinians under occupation, I think the U.S. policy would change tomorrow.”

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — A man who is under house arrest while awaiting sentencing in a murder case had had enough of his parents. So he volunteered to go to jail — early.

Michael Kempker II, 20, contacted the Cole County sheriff’s department late Tuesday night and said he was having trouble at home. He said he wanted to leave before the situation escalated, Sheriff John Hemeyer said.

The sheriff escorted Kempker back to jail, where he has been well-behaved, Hemeyer said.

Kempker had been under house arrest since Dec. 31, after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the Nov. 11 beating death of Paul Thrasher, 20. As part of his plea agreement, prosecutors plan to recommend no more than 30 years in prison, as opposed to the maximum of life.

Prosecutors say Thrasher was beaten to death and run over with his own vehicle. His body was found in a ditch near Russellville nearly two days later.

Library police hunt young girl

LITTLETON, Colo. — A 12-year-old

girl must appear in court for failing to return one of four books she checked out for a research project on dolphins.

Marisa Gohr had already returned three of the four books to the Bemis Public Library in Littleton when the summons arrived. She returned the last book a week after the summons.

“I was kind of scared,” Gohr said about receiving her summons from the Littleton Municipal Court. “I was worried because I’ve never been to court before and I’m so young.”

Officials at the library said a summons is sent out only after several weeks pass and repeated attempts are made to get the book back.

After the summons came, the books were returned and $9 in fines was paid.

When Marisa’s court date came Tuesday, her mother went for her because she didn’t want to take her daughter out of summer school.

Not good enough, according to the court. The judge told Norma Gohr that her daughter, who is named on the summons, is the one who has to appear in court. A new hearing was set for July 9.

Since she has already paid her $9, Marisa will need only to show the court her library receipt and pay a $15 court fee to have her case dismissed.

Marisa said the experience has made her hesitant to check out anything from the library in the future.

Lately, she said, “I just photocopy stuff from books.”

A perfect eighteen years

GLOVERSVILLE, N.Y. — Eric Samrov has never missed a day of school; in 13 years that’s roughly 2,340 school days in a row.

He graduates from Gloversville High School Saturday with a perfect attendance record dating back to kindergarten — repeating a feat of perfection accomplished two years ago by his older brother, Adam Samrov.

Besides minor colds, the brothers said they never got sick during school weeks. Neither had chicken pox, and the more severe illnesses seemed to come up during vacations and summer breaks.

“It’s not that difficult. You just wake up every morning, hope not to be sick and go to school,” said 17-year-old Eric.

The brothers said there was no competition between them. But having made it late into senior year without missing a day, Eric said his focus was set on making it through all 13 years without missing a day.

“If I was dead, I wouldn’t come to school. If I was dying, I wouldn’t come to school,” he said. “That’s pretty much (it).”

Shana Levy (BDP 6/20/02) would like to turn the clock a few years back when liberals of her kind succeeded in preventing pro-Palestinian voices from sharing the progressive platform.

In those times the code word was “ too controversial”. Now the code word is violence and/or terror. Ms. Levy is troubled by the Pro-Palestinian presence at the recent “Not in Our name” peace rally and equating the pro-palestinian with supporting violence only reveals her biases and significant blind spots. Her failure to recognize that the Palestinian movement wants justice and peace, which means freedom from Israeli occupation and Palestinian state along side Israel is significant. Her failure to speak of Israeli violence is inexcusable.

Her refusing to join the rally she came to support is sad. This double standards and blind spots can coexist with progressive ideals only for a time before something will give way and or get exposed.

The natural progression is that Ms. Levy will find herself increasingly comfortable watching FOX cable TV and agreeing with its right wing commentators' views of the Palestinians as violent terror loving people while being fed the rest of that channel’s crap. This transformation of a “progressive” has occurred many times before, and is exemplified by the neo-con magazines Commentary and the New Republic.

In the mean time, the progressive, real peace loving communities and movement should resist cheap shots and blackmail from the pseudo-progressive types like Shana Levy.

For 22 years Jack Ball held class at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley from a bicycle seat. His students rave about how the physical education teacher would take them on bicycle rides to such exciting destinations as Tilden Park, the Berkeley Marina, Point Isabella or Emeryville Market.

He will be retiring from King this June after more than 36 years teaching middle school students. Former students, friends, faculty and parents are invited to a retirement dinner for Ball scheduled for June 13 at Tilden Park's Brazil Room at 5 p.m. Advanced reservations are required.

“He will be deeply missed,” says former King P.E. instructor Ron Nielson.

“You can't teach somewhere for over 30 years and not become part of that place. They will hire someone else, but they won't get anyone like Jack. He was the kind of guy who helped others. There's a fellow he used to run with who developed terminal brain cancer. He would pick him up, bring him swimming and help him get dressed. Recently he's been taking a man in a wheelchair to swim in the pool for disabled at Berkeley High School.”

“He's a sort of institution,” says Terri Gerritz, a colleague at King. “He inspired a lot of kids to triathlons and he inspired safe bike riding.”

Why did he take about 30 thirteen-year-olds on six mile bicycle trips?”I did it because it's something I love to do,” says the veteran teacher. “I just enjoy riding a bike. I enjoy going at a speed where you can still see things, smell things and enjoy your surroundings.”

His goal was to develop his students’ love for cycling “so they would carry it on for many years” and to teach his 1,300 students safe cycling.

“I had them wear helmets before it was the law. I taught them how to ride in a group, how to communicate signals to one another.”

“It was my favorite class at King,” says Berkeley High sophomore Brett Wagner. “I thought it was a lot more fun than other P.E. classes. He is a good person. Mr. Ball gets along well with all the kids, which led to me like his class even more.”

“The stuff we did was unbelievable,” says Berkeley High sophomore Carly Boland. “He took us all over the place. It was an amazing experience to get ourselves everywhere on a bicycle. He was wonderful. He made you want to be able to ride faster and go further.”

“When I saw him on his bike with his students he was really happy. He always had fun with them. He was always an advocate for the students,” says former King Science Teacher Warner Freeman.

“ I found my niche,” says Ball of teaching P.E. “It's something I love to do.”

Ball, who earned a black belt in Karate, also taught self defense classes as well as swimming and gymnastics. He worked summers at King pool.

“Teachers don't get paid much, but when I teach a kid to float and I tell him to use his arms and he realizes he is swimming, he gets such a look on his face. The look on his face is payment enough.”

Ball is equally comfortable in the in the water and running on a trail. As UC Berkeley's Triathlon Coach his students won third place in the national collegiate division triathlon championship in 2001. This year he sent eight UCB students back to the national championships. He still does Olympic distance triathlons himself, which include a 40 kilometer bike ride, a ten kilometer run and a 1.5 kilometer swim. He swam the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon through the bay's rough water.

He was a participant in the first triathlon in San Francisco. “That was back before wet suits. It was at Aquatic Park. We had to swim in the bay, and bicycle and run.” Last year the marathon runner coached a group of Berkeley High seniors to run the 22 mile marathon in Rome, Italy. The students and Ball recruited sponsors and raised almost $30,000 for a recreation room at Children's Hospital.

They chose Children's Hospital because when they visited Gabe Califano, a Berkeley High School student who died of leukemia there was no recreation room for youth. They decided as a group to raise money to build one.

Ball is retiring in June after 37 years of teaching. He taught at King Middle School for more than 33 years and at Portola Middle School in El Cerrito for 4 1/2 years.

Reservations for his June 13 retirement dinner are required. Tickets for the meal cost $48 and can be bought from Teri Gerritz at (510) 644-6377 at King or at 526-4778 at home. Or send Gerritz an email at tgerritz@aol.com. Dessert tickets cost $20.

Former students can join Mr. Ball for a bike ride. Call Teri Gerritz at for more information.

Ball was only 12 when he started teaching swimming, gymnastics and basketball at the Richmond YMCA where his recreation director encouraged Ball to go to school to become a P .E. coach.

The athlete won diving awards at Richmond High School and later at San Francisco State. He graduated from Contra Costa College then went to San Francisco State College where he majored in physical education.

“When I went to San Francisco State they said you have to have a major. I said, ‘What's the easiest major?’ They said ‘P.E.’”

“I was trying to dodge the draft so I stayed in school and got a degree. I graduated and was still trying to dodge the draft so I got a secondary administration credential. Ball lived in the San Francisco during his college days and took part in the peace movent.

A day after Bay Area commuters saw BART fares and Golden Gate Bridge tolls rise, AC Transit released the specifics of its bus fare and pass-price increases. All East Bay Bus riders will pay higher fares starting Sept. 1, except for youth who will see a considerable discount.

Late Thursday, the AC Transit Board of directors voted 4-2 to pass an amended plan that will hike adult fairs from $1.35 to $1.50. Discount fairs including seniors and the disabled, will go up a dime from 65 cents to 75 cents. Youth prices are currently, $1.35 and will be reduced to 75 cents.

Transbay bus riders will see a sharpest fare increase. Commuting across the Bay Bridge will now be $3 instead of $2.50.

The 10-ride book will undergo a slight makeover in addition to its increase. Instead of a book it will now be a prepaid electronic pass with each ride deducted from a magnetic card. The price will increase from $11.50 to $13, and the discount rate will go up from $5.50 to $6.50. The 31-day pass for adults will increase just a dollar, from $49 to $50, while the same pass for seniors and the disabled will go up two dollars to $15.

AC Transit also created a day pass, which is a new option for East Bay bus riders. The $5 pass is good for unlimited rides and transfers within a 24 hour period. The discount rate for the new pass is $3.

The first price change to go into effect will be the sharp decrease in price for the youth pass. Beginning August first passengers between the age of 5 and 17 will only pay $15 for the 31-day pass, down $12 from its old rate. A yearly pass of $150 dollars for youth riders is still in the works. It should be ready in late August, in time for the new school year, said AC Transit representative Mike Mills. The same yearly pass will be free for children who qualify for food vouchers. The criteria for eligibility of this pass are still being determined, and the transit service is still looking for support to subsidize the plan.

AC Transit said that the objective of all the proposals is to generate more fare revenue because of a slump in sales tax revenues.

LOS ANGELES – A new study shows that the production of theatrical films continues to leave the country at an alarming pace.

The amount of money spent to produce films in the United States dropped 17 percent from 1998 through 2001, while production in Canada grew by 144 percent, according to a study conducted by the Center for Entertainment Industry Data and Research. The research group receives support from Raleigh Studios, which has film facilities in Hollywood and Manhattan Beach.

The report found that Canada adopted federal subsidies to attract foreign filmmakers in 1998 that became fully effective in 1999 and 2000.

Canada has been very successful in luring television movie and commercial production, especially movies with budgets of around $10 million.

The new study, which included data from 2001, shows that Canada is having success attracting larger budget films as well.

About $750 million was spent to produce 29 films with budgets between $10.1 million and $50 million in Canada in 2001, the study shows. That compares with $309 million to produce 15 films in the same price range in 1998.

While production of films in the same range also increased in the United States during the same period, the U.S. share of that lucrative market fell.

On Tuesday, the City Council approved a $552,000 facelift for Berkeley’s Live Oak Park and Recreation Center.

The state-funded project is slated to begin construciton Aug. 28. Project designs began a year ago.

The heavily-used north Berkeley park and recreation center were recently determined as not safe during an earthquake. The primary goal of the rebuilding venture is to provide a “seismic structural upgrade” that will improve safety for the community, said Lisa Caronna, director of Parks, Recreation, and Waterfront.

“It’s deteriorated over the years due to deferred maintenance” Caronna said. “Our goal, first and foremost is to improve seismic safety,” she said, adding, “The park is desperately in need of a make-over.”

Live Oak Park opened in 1916, and the Recreation Center in 1956. The park and Recreation center covers 5.5 acres off Shattuck Avenue and Berryman Street, and has a 200-capactiy social hall, two basketball courts, and lighted tennis and volleyball courts as well. It is one of three recreation centers in Berkeley, along with Frances Albrier Community Center and James Keeney Recreation Center.

Dan Belson, associate civil engineer for the City of Berkeley is the project manager for the rebuilding project, officially called a “seismic retrofit.”

“When dealing with an existing facility,” Belson said, “the first goal is to do work with the least amount of destruction to the building.”

Belson outlined the architectural plans for the project, which involves modifying the existing walls, not tearing them down, to provide enough resistance for an earthquake. “We will strengthen the walls to act as one,” Belson said.

Belson specified three rooms of the recreation center – the Fireside room, Activity room, and Game room – as areas in which windows will be replaced by walls to be tied into the foundation, the existing walls, and the roof to provide more strength.

“We use the 1906 earthquake as a model to determine the maximum probable force a building can withstand,” Belson said. He explained that seismic upgrade projects such as this one build around that model.

Though earthquake-proofing is at the top of the construction agenda, the rebuilding will also improve handicapped accessibility to the recreation center on the Shattuck Avenue side. It will open a skylight in the corridor, improve the mechanical and electrical systems and provide internal repairs. Included in the plan are a more usable kitchen and basic renovations such as painting.

Belson said the project will take six months to complete. An expansion is not part of the rebuilding project.

Live Oak Park and Recreation Center houses a variety of year-round programs, everything from after-school programs and a Teen Club, to puppy training, swing dancing and Japanese Taiko drumming. It can also be reserved and rented out for special events.

“It is great for North Berkeley to have this,” said Caronna. After the rebuilding, Caronna is confident about Live Oak’s role in Berkeley.

“It will be a much more welcoming environment for the community,” she said.

The contract has been awarded to Angotti and Reilly of San Francisco. The money for the project is coming from Prop. 12, a bond measure passed at the state level that granted $500,000 for the project. Funding also came from the city’s Capital Improvement Program, which pitched in $200,000.

The Angotti and Reilly bid will leave the city with apprxoiamtely $148,000 left over from the original grant, approved by voters in 2000.

NEW IBERIA, La. — Four people were slightly injured Friday when an Amtrak train heading to Los Angeles ran into a truck that was stuck on railroad tracks in rural Iberia Parish.

The conductor, one of his assistants and two train passengers were treated at area hospitals after the accident at about 4:30 p.m., state police spokesman Will Williams said. They were not identified.

The truck driver, Sherwin J. Neal of Houma, was crossing the tracks between New Iberia and Cade when the trailer that was hitched to his truck got stuck, Williams said. Neal fled the truck when he saw the train coming.

Williams said Neal will probably be ticketed for obstruction of a railway.

A portion of state Highway 182 was closed for more than four hours as emergency crews worked to clean up debris, pipe and diesel fuel from the scene, Williams said.

The train originated in Orlando, Fla., and remained at the accident scene late Friday. The train would continue on its route when a new conductor arrived, Williams said.

SACRAMENTO — A federal judge ruled on Friday to stop the implementation of a law that would have required the nation’s biggest bankers to include credit card “warnings” in monthly customer statements.

The ruling, handed out by U.S. District Judge Frank C. Damrell in Sacramento, comes three days before the law was set to go into effect.

A group of high-powered financial corporations, including Chase Manhattan Bank USA, CitiBank and MNBA America Bank, filed the suit a month ago to stop the law that would require the companies to warn customers about how long it takes to pay off balances by just paying the minimum monthly payment.

The ruling comes as a shock to many consumer advocate groups who worked on the bill, signed by Gov. Gray Davis last year, who say the credit card companies never raised any of these concerns before, even though they actively participated in designing the legislation.

“We’re disappointed,” said Hallye Jordan, spokeswoman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer, named as a co-defendant in the case with the state Department of Consumer Affairs. “A good consumer law is postponed as a result of the bankers waiting to file a 11th-hour lawsuit over a law they helped negotiate.”

At least a dozen corporate lawyers appeared in court on Friday to argue the law would interfere with interstate banking, which is illegal under federal law.

The new law would have required the companies to send the warnings only to customers who make just the minimum payment for six months in a row. Credit card companies that have monthly payments of 10 percent or more of the entire balance are exempt.

Howard N. Cayne, an attorney for the Washington D.C.-based firm representing the banks, said that because adding the warnings would be costly, banks would have no other choice than to increase their minimum monthly payments. States are not allowed to pass laws that interfere with monthly payment schedules or interest.

“National bank powers trump the state law,” Douglas Jordan, senior counsel for the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, told the judge.

Although Damrell scolded the plaintiffs for waiting until the last minute to file the lawsuit, he said he had “serious concerns” about the law.

He ordered both sides to research the issue and told the bankers to perform a cost-benefit analysis to prove the warnings would be burdensome. Both parties will turn in their reports in October and the case will be reheard on Nov. 8.

Do we have any Mars rocks on Earth? Perhaps. No spacecraft has brought back rock samples from Mars like the ones astronauts brought back from the Moon. But some Mars rocks might have made their way to Earth on their own. Scientists have found about a dozen rocks on Earth that might be meteorites from Mars. These are pieces of the planet that were chipped off by a collision with a space rock long ago. The rocks match samples of Martian soil analyzed by the Viking landers. Some scientists think that one such meteorite, found in Antarctica, might even contain fossils of tiny organisms called bacteria — but, as often happens, other scientists disagree.

SAN JOSE — Twice within the last two years, Apple Computer Inc. executives sold company stock worth millions of dollars just weeks before Apple warned of disappointing financial results. Each earnings warning sent shares tumbling.

While the sales could have an innocent explanation, analysts consider them unusual because at no other point during the period did any other clusters of large sell-offs by Apple executives occur.

Big stock sales among executives are common, especially in the high-tech sector, where stock options are often a major part of compensation.

But insider-trading analysts consider the Apple executives’ sales unusual because the people involved, though they were mostly exercising stock options, tend to be less active stock sellers.

“These sells seem to be well-timed,” said Lon Gerber, director of insider research at Thomson Financial, coming as they did on the eve of two of three Apple earnings warnings over a period that began in August 2000.

“It’s always a bit suspicious” when executives sell before a warning, said Martin Friedman, director of research at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. Inc.

The Cupertino-based computer maker defended the sales, which were questioned in a column last week on a Web site for Mac enthusiasts called Resexcellence.com.

Apple denied any notion of impropriety.

“I can assure you that no executive would have exercised options had they believed we would not meet our original guidance for the quarter,” Fred Anderson, Apple’s chief financial officer, said in a written statement.

Anderson, one of the executives who sold stock prior to the warnings, refused further comment. So did all the others after attempts by The Associated Press to reach each individually.

The biggest flurry of sales — 1.9 million shares worth more than $49 million — occurred between April 22 and May 31, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and were executed by Anderson and five other executives: senior vice president of applications Sina Tamaddon; senior vice president and general counsel Nancy Heinen; senior vice president of software engineering Avie Tevanian; senior vice president of finance Peter Oppenheimer.

Parents, lock up the children. Retailers, check those IDs. Perhaps the most politically incorrect video game ever created is for sale this minute, threatening the very foundations of our Republic.

“State of Emergency,” from Vis Interactive and Rockstar, will turn your PlayStation 2 into the bloodstained scene of a massacre unlike any you’ve ever seen.

Critics have decried SOE almost since it was announced last year, with pundits comparing the gory violence to any number of recent urban riots.

Of course, there have been other games where everyone was a potential victim, including the very popular Grand Theft Auto III.

SOE takes it a step further.

Both games use missions as a basis for the beatdowns that follow. SOE’s 175 missions, set in four areas of Capitol City, are for the most part pathetically easy to complete, with points given for totally random destruction. Smashing windows, for instance, piles up hundreds of points per pane.

The feeling of total anarchy and panic is beautifully captured in SOE. Enter a mall and hundreds of people are racing everywhere at top speed or falling to the ground, cowering in terror. They certainly have plenty to fear, as heavily armed cops, gangs of thugs and black-suited “Corporation” goons are everywhere, quashing revolution.

Your characters — two are available from the start, with three more available as you progress — are handy with fists and feet. Weapons are available, scattered around each arena or torn from the dying fingers of your victims. Machine guns, Molotov cocktails, swords, bats, clubs, chairs — whatever you can find can be used to make the slaughter more efficient.

You do lose points for offing innocent civilians, but it’s almost impossible to avoid it.

Also lying around are health boosts and little clocks to extend your time. Both are crucial to your success, so don’t pass any by.

The story line revolves around opposition to the “Corporation,” which took over after big business was given a free hand in 2010. Growing unrest led Corporation bigwigs to declare a state of emergency and turn their goons loose on the populace.

A bizarre story, but one that conspiracy theorists are already predicting.

Graphics get a B. Not only are they full of detail and nicely colored, but there are so many of them. The screen is usually jammed with dozens of people, all running and waving their arms and scurrying in a million directions. A great job just getting all those folks on your TV.

Control earns a B. The combat portion works well, but moving your character to face enemies attacking from different directions isn’t always as smooth as it might be. Some controls serve double duty; after you’ve knocked somebody down, pushing the punch buttons lets you stomp and batter the fallen body as blood squirts from the wounds. How tasteful.

Sound gets a C+. The weapons sounds are adequate and the voices are acceptable, although the comments get very repetitive. The soundtrack is routine, with no “name” performers.

Give “State of Emergency” a B. It breaks no new ground and is about as deep as a dimple, but for the young male audience for which it was designed, it’s pure gold.

Parents, here’s your chance to act responsibly. “State of Emergency” carries an M rating, for ages 17 and older, and it is well deserved. This game should not fall into little hands under any circumstances.

On The Net: www.rockstargames.com/stateofemergency www.visentertainment.com

SPRINGVILLE, Utah — Nature’s Way Products is recalling four lots of an herbal allergy-relief dietary supplement, saying Friday that excessive amounts of lead were found in the product.

The product, Nettle, is sold in 100-capsule white bottles that come with green lids. The tainted pills were distributed nationwide, mostly to health food retail outlets, from October to May.

Affected lot numbers, which can be identified by numbers printed on the bottom of each bottle, are 131237, 131238, 140738 and 215229.

People who ingest high levels of lead, especially children, can suffer serious damage to the central nervous system.

Nature’s Way said in a statement the product was found to have “excessive amounts of lead,” but company spokesman Gordon Walker couldn’t elaborate.

“It varies by lot,” he said.

Walker said the company wasn’t aware of any consumer health problems related to the discovery.

The problem was traced to a single batch of raw material used in manufacturing the four affected lots. Walker said the company was investigating with a supplier to determine how the lead reached the product.

Nature’s Way learned of the problem through the California Attorney General’s Office, which discovered it through a random testing program “within the last few weeks,” Walker said.

SACRAMENTO — A former technology aide to Gov. Gray Davis has admitted that he brought up the subject of campaign contributions with a salesman for a Silicon Valley company seeking a state contract.

Vin Patel, who was fired as Davis’ interim e-government director Wednesday, says he brought up the fact that the company’s founder had made a contribution to former Republican gubernatorial candidate Richard Riordan.

“I casually mentioned it to him, but I didn’t have the intention of creating any type of link” with the contract, Patel told the San Jose Mercury News. “If I did do something I apologize.”

An unidentified source told the newspaper that Patel went on to suggest that the company, BEA Systems, wouldn’t be getting the contract.

“I think he said words to the effect: It doesn’t look like we’ll be doing business with BEA,” the source said.

A spokesman for BEA, Kevin McGuirk, said the company didn’t get the contract.

“Vin Patel had publicly admitted to making a comment to our salesman about a ‘donation his boss made to Richard Riordan.’ We think this speaks for itself,” McGuirk said Friday.

Davis spokeswoman Hilary McLean said no business was offered that contract because it hasn’t been granted yet.

“And BEA does have other business with the state,” McLean said. She didn’t have specific information on those other deals.

It’s the second time that a former Davis aide has been accused of putting pressure on a technology company about campaign contributions.

Elias Cortez, the suspended director of the state Department of Information Technology, told a legislative committee last week that Patel’s predecessor as director of e-government, Arun Baheti, contacted an official with the Oracle Corp. to complain about campaign contributions to Republicans.

Baheti said the allegations were an “absolute falsehood” and challenged Cortez to produce some evidence.

Baheti was fired after he acted as an intermediary in delivering a $25,000 campaign contribution from Oracle to Davis.

Baby Boomers aren’t getting any younger, and neither are their parents.

Its a fact of life that many Boomers must shoulder the responsibility to care for the homes of their elderly parents.

Yet according to the Lowe’s Home Safety Council, more than simple upkeep is involved. Because the elderly are more at risk for accidents, safety is a major consideration.

With the elderly being targets of much-publicized home-improvement scam artists, Lowe’s recommends you first build a list of home-improvement specialists you trust. This removes your parents from high-pressure negotiation tactics and puts you in control. It’s not a bad idea to schedule a regular walk through the home with your home-improvement expert to review what work needs to be done — and for how much money.

Next, pay close attention to the safety aspects of the home.

In particular, the Lowe’s Home Safety Council identifies certain items you should red-flag for immediate action:

n Are steps protected by hand railings and nonskid surfaces?

n Are area rugs backed by rubber or two-sided tape to reduce slippage?

n Do all interior light bulbs have enough wattage to illuminate portions of the home?

n Are exterior portions of the home adequately lighted? This applies both to security and general lighting.

n Install motion detectors to kick on exterior floodlights and lamps in some interior rooms.

n Install railings in baths and showers.

n Consider railings along hallway walls.

n Are cracks and gaps in paving and sidewalks filled and smoothed?

n Is there enough attic insulation and are all windows weatherproofed?

n Adding storm doors is a good idea to protect parents from drafts.

n Install both smoke- and carbon-dioxide detectors. Check the batteries regularly. Locate a fire extinguisher near the kitchen, and make sure your parents know how to use it properly.

n Ask trusted neighbors to keep an eye on the house. Give them your phone and e-mail addresses.

“When you help your parents take important safety measures in their home, you are not only ensuring the safety of your parents, but of everyone who comes into contact with the home, including visitors and grandchildren,” explains David Oliver, Lowe’s Home Safety Council Executive Director. “These steps lead to a more comfortable, convenient and secure living environment for the entire family.”

The nonprofit’s tax forms show that William E. Simon & Sons charged $670,000 in fees to oversee an average $10.9 million in foundation assets in 2000, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday in its “Lazarus at Large” business column. That amounts to a 6.1 percent commission.

The industry standard for a fund that size, according to independent money managers and accountants interviewed by the Chronicle, is about 1 percent.

Simon spokesman Jeff Flint said the fee was high because Simon & Sons handles both investment management and administrative costs, including the salaries of six employees. He said the fee was reasonable in light of the $7.5 million in donations made by the William E. Simon Foundation in 2000.

Simon has refused to release his personal tax returns, but the returns of nonprofit organizations are public documents.

Money managers and accountants with experience in the field said the $670,000 paid to Simon & Sons was unusually high.

“Does it really take (several) people to give away $7.5 million?” Ken Winans, a Novato money manager, asked the Chronicle. “It’s not like they gave away $700 million. I have a hard time believing it cost $670,000 to deal with a portfolio that size.” Flint said Friday that only $20,000 of the sum was for asset management. He said the remainder was for reimbursement of expenses to Simon & Sons, and the bulk of that — $442,000 — went to pay employee salaries, bonuses, benefits and payroll taxes.

Functional rooms like kitchens and baths typically are fitted with wall-hung cupboards and storage areas.

Still, there’s plenty to be said for junking the wood-veneer boxes attached to your walls. The rewards of starting from scratch with a few attractive, functional dressers, tables and freestanding cabinets are worth it.

Space you didn’t know you had is the most notable benefit of this design concept. According to British interior designer Johnny Grey, who focuses mainly on kitchen design, “An illusion of spaciousness (is) achieved by leaving space around each piece of furniture, rather than fitting cupboards from wall to wall.” This now-exposed wall area can host well-placed shelves and hooks for extra storage and display. Your room will be tailored to your specific needs and tastes in a way rooms full of factory-made storage spaces can’t.

Home designers and those in the cabinet industry have gotten wise to this idea and have begun designing and manufacturing storage units that have the look of furniture and the ease of predesigned cabinets. The bath shown here features attractive vanity cupboards; dresser legs replace the flat-front toe space usually seen where the storage units meet the floors in baths and kitchens. Atop a matching set of drawers and cabinets is a tall, open-faced shelf secured to the wall, which reveals its contents — towels, photos and art — without shame.

UNITED NATIONS — In a big boost to the global fight against climate change, the 15 nations in the European Union formally ratified the Kyoto Protocol on Friday and urged the United States to end its opposition to the treaty.

The European Union has been in the forefront of the campaign to cut pollution that is warming the planet and the simultaneous ratifications by its members represented a major step toward the treaty’s entry into force.

The ceremony also highlighted the Bush administration’s isolation as the only announced opponent of the 1997 accord. One by one, envoys from the 15 EU members presented the documents of ratification from their governments to U.N. legal adviser Hans Corell in the main press room at U.N. headquarters.

EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom, who handed over a separate ratification from the organization itself, hailed the “historic moment for global efforts to combat climate change” and pointedly singled out the United States as the only country to reject the treaty.

To take effect, the Kyoto accord must be ratified by 55 countries, but the ratifications must also include industrialized nations responsible for at least 55 percent of the 1990 levels of greenhouse gases blamed for heating up the atmosphere.

The EU boosted the number of ratifications to about 70, topping the minimum needed, and pushed the treaty about halfway to the goal of 55 percent of the greenhouse gas pollution levels for it to enter into force.

The EU, whose members produced 24.2 percent of emissions in 1990, represented the first major industrialized bloc to ratify the treaty. Before Friday, the vast majority of countries that had ratified were developing countries.

The Kyoto Protocol was signed by the Clinton administration, but never ratified by the U.S. Senate. President Bush backed out of it last year, saying it would have cost the U.S. economy $400 billion and 4.9 million jobs.

“The European Union urges the United States to reconsider its position and to return to and participate in the global framework for addressing climate change that this protocol provides,” Wallstrom said.

Bush unveiled an alternative proposal to the Kyoto accord in February which he said would reduce greenhouse gases, curb pollution and promote energy efficiency. But Wallstrom argued that it will lead instead “to a significant increase of more than 30 percent above 1990 levels” of greenhouse gas emissions by 2012.

With the United States, which was responsible for 36.1 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 1990, opting out of the treaty, the EU said the support of Japan, which was responsible for 8.5 percent, and Russia, which was responsible for 17.4 percent, is crucial.

The EU is pushing for the treaty to enter into force by the time the U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development begins in Johannesburg in late August.

Japan is expected to ratify next week but Wallstrom said Russia’s parliament may not ratify until the fall.

The Kyoto Protocol aims to cut global emissions by 5.2 percent from their 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. The EU must cut its emissions by 8 percent.

Most people envision waterlilies daubed on large canvases when they think of the artist Monet’s flowers. Nasturtiums are another possibility, for Monet planted them in abundance. They spilled out of beds into paths, frothing like ocean water on a beach to soften his garden’s edges.

Nasturtiums are good flowers even for beginning gardeners. The large seeds germinate reliably, and do not need starting indoors for early bloom. Press a few seeds into the ground even now and you will be rewarded with nonstop bloom in a few weeks. The round, slightly bluish leaves are distinctive, making it easy to distinguish seedlings from weedlings. And once nasturtiums take off, they blanket the ground thickly enough to crowd out weeds.

Nasturtium flowers come in bright reds and oranges and yellows, toned down by masses of foliage so as never to be too glaring. Be careful not to give nasturtiums too rich a soil, or the foliage will overgrow and hide too many of the blossoms. Dwarf varieties, growing only a foot or so high, are good for small window boxes or in pots. There also are semi-trailing types, which sprawl outward a couple of feet or more. Nasturtium can cover a fence if you plant a climbing type, which typically grows about 7 feet tall and has single, fragrant flowers. Climbing nasturtiums grasp to support with their twining leaf stalks, just as clematis vines do.

Bright flowers and lush masses of pretty, round leaves are enough to ask for from any plant, but nasturtiums offer even more. You can eat them. Nasturtium flowers liven up salads with their color and peppery flavor. That peppery flavor, incidentally, gives the plant its name, which means “nose twister.” It will make your nose respond the way it does to mustard or radishes.

Nasturtium is one of those plants that could be called a “supermarket” plant, because it provides such a variety of foods. If you tire of eating the flowers, eat the leaves, in sandwiches, chopped directly into salads, or mixed into butter to make a spicy spread. Pickled, the large seeds or seed pods make savory substitutes for capers (which are pickled buds of an unrelated Mediterranean bush).

NEW DELHI, India — India’s defense minister insisted Friday the border with Pakistan was stable, even as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz warned that a war between the South Asian rivals would be “somewhere between terrible and catastrophic.”

Diplomatic pressure grew to avert another war between the nuclear-armed rivals, and the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Canada and Australia urged their citizens to consider leaving India.

Indian officials played down fears of a conflict over disputed Kashmir, even as Pakistan pulled soldiers away from the Afghan border, where they had been helping the U.S.-led war on terrorism. Pakistani officials said they were considering moving the soldiers toward India.

“There isn’t any change on the ground,” Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes told The Associated Press in Singapore, where he was attending an Asian defense conference. “The situation is stable.”

Wolfowitz, who was also at the conference, said U.S. efforts to prevent war include both promises of incentives and warnings of punishments. He did not say what the incentives or punishments would be.

“I don’t think we believe in exhortation alone,” Wolfowitz said. He said a war between the nuclear rivals would be “somewhere between terrible and catastrophic” and would destroy hard-earned improvements in U.S. relations with both countries.

A top Indian military officer said Friday on condition of anonymity that the diplomatic pressure on both countries was unprecedented and playing a major role.

President Bush announced Thursday that he would send Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the region next week. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage also is scheduled to visit Islamabad and New Delhi next week.

Shelling continued Friday across the tense frontier separating India and Pakistan in Kashmir, the divided Himalayan region both nations claim and have fought two wars over.

Pakistan’s military said Indian shelling killed one Pakistani and injured two others Friday. India said Pakistani shelling killed one border guard and four soldiers. In another incident, five Indian police were injured when suspected Islamic militants lobbed a grenade.

Stock markets in India and Pakistan appeared to be taking the war fears in stride. The Bombay exchange’s key Sensex index has dipped by about 4 percent this year, while Pakistan’s KSE-100 index was actually up by 31 percent in the first five months of 2002.

The rivals have about 1 million soldiers on high alert along their border, and Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf said he was considering moving more troops to Kashmir.

Pet stains not only are unsightly, but also often result in less-than-pleasant odors. A simple and effective way to get a pet stain out is to use a solution of 2 tablespoons of Spic-n-Span in 1 gallon of warm water — working the solution into the area with a cloth or sponge. Next, rinse the area with 1-half cup of white vinegar in 1 gallon of warm water. This will help to neutralize the detergent and prevent it from attracting dirt. Finally, blot the area with a dry towel to remove any excess dampness. Hard-hit areas might require professional steam-cleaning, replacement of the pad below, or even a bleaching of the concrete or wood substrate to kill the odor-causing bacteria.

LONG BEACH – Police struggled Friday to find the motive for a deadly shooting rampage in a neighborhood market by a gunman who was found to have the skeletal remains of two people in his home.

Antonio Pineiro, 48, had no criminal record before he walked into the Top Valu Market and sprayed dozens of bullets from a .38-caliber revolver and a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun before he was killed by officers Thursday evening, police Lt. Bill Blair said.

“We have not clearly established the motive,” Blair said.

Neighbors said they hadn’t seen his parents for a year and that Pineiro had said they moved away.

Shooting survivor Conrad Ibasco, 45, dragged his wife to safety after his 8-year-old daughter, Barbara, was shot in the head as mother and child stood in line at the checkout stand.

“I heard three shots. I was at the produce aisle,” he said. “I ran over to my wife and I saw that my daughter was down.”

“I said to my wife, ’Just leave Barbara. She’s going to be fine,’ but I knew she was dead.”

Ibasco was grazed in the left leg and his wife, Meryna, was wounded in the left arm. He pulled her into an aisle and they cowered there until police arrived.

Also killed was store clerk Marcela Perez, 38, of Long Beach.

People were running from the store when police arrived to confront the gunman, who was standing near the checkout stands. Pineiro fired at least one shot at officers but missed and was wounded several times by return fire, Blair said. All told, more than 40 shots were exchanged, he said.

The Ibascos were treated at a hospital and released. Also treated for wounds and released were Richard Coleman, 32, of Long Beach and Concepcion Henriquez, 58, of Long Beach.

The shooting left the market spattered with blood. But it was cleaned up and open for business Friday.

Pineiro lived behind the store in a working-class part of the port city 25 miles south of Los Angeles. The Ibascos lived two blocks away.

On Friday, Mrs. Ibasco lay sleeping on the couch in their living room, which bore a cross and religious pictures above a mantelpiece covered with religious dolls. Ibasco chain-smoked as he talked with reporters.

“I just leave it to God,” he said. “Sometimes evil triumphs over good. I know it’s hard but I have to accept it.”

Ibasco said his daughter, a smiling girl with dark bangs, loved the “Harry Potter” movie, and Ibasco said she watched it five times in a row after he recently bought a copy for her.

“She was active in class. She was outgoing. She didn’t know the word shyness,” he said.

Scattered in her bedroom were “Hello Kitty” stuffed dolls. A construction-paper sign with her name was taped to her door.

In Pineiro’s condominium, police found the decomposed bodies of two people. They were discovered on a bed.

They had been dead perhaps more than a year, Blair estimated, and their ages, genders and cause of death were yet to be determined.

Authorities suspected the bones might be those of Pineiro’s parents, who vanished about a year ago.

Residents of the condominium complex said Pineiro told some people that they had moved to Miami, others that they had returned to Cuba.

Pineiro was described as a loner who didn’t socialize.

“He never says hi or talks to anybody,” said Anthony Martin, 20. “He seems to come and go very quietly.”

Derek Duncan, 48, lived in the complex for two years. He said Pineiro rarely spoke to anyone and was only seen getting the mail or smoking cigarettes by the back gate, which opens into the market parking lot.

“We barbecue down here, and he wouldn’t come out,” he said. “He just kept to himself.”

Blair said Pineiro had no prior criminal record but had filed a police report as a burglary victim. He did not provide details.

Emmie Vida, an active leader in the Berkeley Jewish community died Monday of natural causes at the age of 93. Vida, who along with her husband Rabbi George Vida and their two children fled Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation of World War II, dedicated much of her life to helping and sharing history with others.

After moving to Berkeley more than 20 years ago, Vida assumed a number of leadership roles at Congregation Beth El. She became a facilitator of the congregation’s popular Torah Study and also a member of the Sisterhood of the Synagogue. In addition, Vida was an active member of the local Jewish Community Center and helped support Hadassa, an international social service organization.

Local community members describe Vida as a cheerful, welcoming and loving person. “She really was a saint to her community,” said Marian Magid, former president of Beth El. Vida always encouraged new members at the congregation and participated in a number of workshops and youth programs says Rabbi Ferenc Arj of Beth El.

“She would always encourage people to speak up by saying that there were no silly questions only silly answers,” Arj said.

With a love for history and learning, Vida became a short story writer and storyteller, chronicling the life of her family as survivors of the Holocaust. She was the subject of an interview for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Project, a series of videotaped testimonials from survivors of the Holocaust.

According to Arj, Vida was a very studious individual and continued learning throughout her life. Arj also says that Vida participated in congregation activities up until the very end of her life.

Vida is survived by her daughter, Ruth Meltsner of El Cerrito, her son, Henry Vida of Gum Spring, her brother Leo Koppel and sister Karola Loeb. She is also survived by five grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and many nieces and nephews.

Memorial contributions can be made to Hadassah or Congregation Beth El. Vida will be buried in Paramus, New Jersey with her husband, who died in 1989. A gathering to celebrate her life is scheduled for Sunday at 10 a.m. at Congregation Beth El.

Asked state energy traders to buy unnecessary power at above-market rates

SACRAMENTO – The operators of the state’s power grid said Friday a state senator’s accusation that they manipulated California’s energy market is “wholly untrue.”

The Independent System Operator said grid operators were reacting to a transmission line problem in November 2001 when it asked state energy traders to buy unnecessary power at above-market rates, which the state later had to sell at a loss.

State Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Santa Ana, called that a request for the state to schedule “fictitious” energy demands.

The ISO Board of Governors has formed a special committee to review Dunn’s allegations, said Charles Robinson, ISO’s general counsel.

Though the report released Friday was a preliminary report, Robinson said he’s “pretty confident based on, what management has been able to determine that there’s nothing to the allegation of market manipulation.”

Robinson said the scrutiny of the grid by Dunn’s committee is justified because of the scope of the energy crisis, but added, “I would prefer a process where the conclusions are reached at the end of the investigation, rather than the beginning.”

Dunn, chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Price Manipulation of the Wholesale Energy Market, called the preliminary report “the same-old, same-old nonsense from the ISO. It’s a lot of technical talk that doesn’t get to the core issue.”

Dunn’s committee released a transcript of a November 2001 telephone call between ISO schedulers and state power buyers at the Department of Water Resources.

DWR traders thought it was an “unusual request,” and asked ISO to call back on a recorded line, said DWR spokesman Oscar Hidalgo. DWR agreed to sell some power it had already purchased in order to arrange a sale directly with two generators.

The ISO said maintenance on a major transmission line in Southern California required additional energy to be produced in both the north and south areas of the state.

Federal regulators had required generators to keep their plants operating at a minimum level, but ISO officials were concerned that some generators weren’t obeying that order.

In the report, ISO officials say they had three choices for dealing with the transmission glitch: buy power in the spot market, arrange ahead of time for additional power plants to be operating, or resort to rolling blackouts.

There was no guarantee that there would be power available in the spot market, and rolling blackouts can have “health, safety and economic risks,” the report said.

When ISO attempted to order two power plants to come online, one company, Reliant Energy, refused to comply unless it had a guarantee it would be paid, the ISO said. Another power company reported maintenance problems with its plant.

To force the plants to come online, the ISO asked DWR to purchase energy directly from the energy producers.

Dunn said that amounts to grid operators “gaming the gamers” in the electricity market.

SACRAMENTO — A federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the implementation of a law that would require the nation’s biggest bankers to include credit card payment “warnings” in monthly customer statements.

The ruling, handed down by U.S. District Judge Frank C. Damrell, came three days before the law was set to go into effect.

A group of high-powered financial corporations, including Chase Manhattan Bank USA, CitiBank and MNBA America Bank, filed a lawsuit a month ago to stop the law, which would require the companies to warn customers about how long it takes to pay off credit card balances by just making the minimum monthly payment.

The ruling came as a shock to many consumer advocate groups, which said the credit card companies never raised any concerns before, even though they actively participated in designing the legislation.

“We’re disappointed,” said Hallye Jordan, spokeswoman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer, named as a co-defendant in the case with the state Department of Consumer Affairs.

FRONTERA — A parole board refused Friday to grant freedom to former Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten after an emotional hearing focusing on the cruelty of the cult killings that landed her in prison 33 years ago.

The ruling came after a prosecutor and the family of victims Leno and Rosemary La Bianca urged the Board of Prison Terms never to grant parole to the now 52-year-old woman who was described as a model prisoner.

“This was a cruel and calculated murder and a matter that demonstrates a disregard for human suffering,” said Sharon Lawin, the board commissioner who chaired the hearing.

Earlier, Van Houten pleaded for her freedom, telling the board she will always bear the sorrow of the murders.

“One of the hardest things in dealing with having contributed to murder is that there’s no restitution, there’s no making it right,” she said.

Van Houten was in handcuffs and shackled around her waist. She wore a gray sweat shirt and sweat pants.

Defense attorney Christie Webb said Van Houten was disappointed, frustrated and saddened by the ruling.

“It’s very difficult to be a 52-year-old woman, a decent person and to be treated in that room like the 19-year-old cult victim she was,” Webb said. “It’s very difficult to hear someone say you should be dead.”

Earlier in the hearing, Louis Smaldino, the nephew of Leno La Bianca, told the board that Van Houten should stay in prison for the rest of her life.

“Miss Van Houten should already be dead for her part in these unprovoked murders,” he said. “Society has been very merciful.”

Turning to Van Houten, he said, “There is no way to make it right. Serve your life sentence with acceptance of what you have done.”

It was Van Houten’s 14th appearance before the parole board. She had been considered the most likely of the Manson followers to win parole after a judge ruled last month that the board had repeatedly failed to give her guidance on what she could do to make herself suitable for release.

Nevertheless, Van Houten was denied parole for at least two more years after the board determined she had not fully expressed remorse.

Lawin said the board was particularly swayed by the fact that the killings were part of a grand plan by Manson to start a race war.

The board did commend Van Houten’s behavior in prison — from working as a chapel clerk to making audio tapes to help other inmates.

“These positive aspects of her behavior, however, do not yet outweigh the factors of unsuitability,” Lawin said.

Lawin recommended Van Houten for continued therapy to better understand the enormity of her crime and its impact.

Van Houten was a 19-year-old disciple of Manson in the summer of 1969 when she participated in the stabbing deaths of the La Biancas in their home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles.

They were among nine Los Angeles-area victims slain by the cult of drugged-out followers. Prosecutors said Manson was trying to incite a race war that he believed was prophesied in the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter.”

Van Houten was not present when followers of Manson killed actress Sharon Tate and four others at the actress’ Beverly Hills mansion. Manson was not at the home, either.

Van Houten, Manson, his chief lieutenant Charles “Tex” Watson, and two other women, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkle, were convicted and sentenced to death for their part in the Tate-La Bianca murders.

The sentences were later commuted to life when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in the 1970s. All five are still behind bars.

During the hearing, Van Houten spoke quietly and directly as she recounted the horrifying facts of the murders that Manson directed.

She recalled that Watson was in the living room killing Leno La Bianca and she was in the bedroom with Rosemary La Bianca.

Asked if she had stabbed the woman, Van Houten said, “Yes I did in the lower torso approximately 14 to 16 times.”

Earlier this month, Superior Court Judge Bob N. Krug admonished the parole board for flatly turning Van Houten down every time based solely on the crime.

Such decisions, he said, ignore Van Houten’s accomplishments in prison and turn her life sentence into life without parole, in violation of the law.

In addition, Krug said that Van Houten had successfully completed every rehabilitation program offered in prison and that her psychiatric evaluations indicate that she is not a present danger to society and should be found suitable for parole.

XSAN FRANCISCO – A U.S. Army lieutenant whose jaw is wired shut from a bullet wound he received in Afghanistan said screeners at San Francisco International Airport denied him permission to pass through security with wire clippers used to snap open his jaw in an emergency.

Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Deirdre O’Sullivan said the agency is investigating the incident.

Lt. Greg Miller, a combat medic and member of a special forces patrol and a Purple Heart recipient, was shot in Kandahar in April. The bullet passed through his jaw, severing nerves and leaving him without feeling in his mouth.

He said his jaw was wired shut at a hospital in Germany, and his doctor issued him a pair of wire clippers to carry at all times in case he became sick and needed to open his jaw to avoid choking.

Miller had flown to the Bay Area to visit his mother, the administrative assistant to the superintendent of the Millbrae School District.

Miller, who lives in College Station, Texas, said officials at the Easterwood Airport there checked out the wire cutters before he boarded the plane to San Francisco via Dallas. Miller said they made a series of calls, then tagged the cutters with a code that security personnel could look up to see that the cutters were not a prohibited item.

LOS ANGELES — Electricity companies have issued a warning about the upcoming movie “Like Mike” because the plot involves a pair of sneakers a boy retrieves from a power line.

The family comedy stars rapper Lil’ Bow Wow as a teenager who gains magical basketball-playing abilities after lightning strikes him while he is unsnagging the shoes.

Instead of constricting his muscles, searing his flesh, burning his lungs and stopping his heart, the extreme electrical current gives the boy the ability to compete in the NBA.

“We’re worried that kids are going to see this and get electrocuted,” said Jason Alderman, spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. “The reality is if you touch a power line like that you’ll be seriously injured at best, and at worst die.”

Southern California Edison and Progress Energy Inc. have also issued warnings about the movie.

Alderman said PG&E has asked the film’s studio, 20th Century Fox, to either change the scene or add a disclaimer, but most of the thousands of prints for the July 3 debut are already completed and shipped.

“The scene is clearly not meant to be real or present behavior to be emulated by youngsters,” said Fox spokeswoman Flo Grace. “The film in no way advocates taking dangerous risks of any kind, including touching power lines.”

SAN BERNARDINO – A wildfire raced out of control over 1,500 acres in the San Bernardino National Forest just north of the city Friday, destroying a wing of a 1930s-era hotel, authorities said. No injuries were reported.

The fire was burning north, climbing higher into the San Bernardino Mountains, where small communities and resorts are located. Air tankers released loads of fire retardant on the brushy slopes in an attempt to corral the blaze.

“I’m seeing flames — 30-foot flames — and my deck is covered completely in ash,” said Jamie Mariani, a server at the Cliffhanger Restaurant in Crestline, as she watched the fire burn in the forest on the mountain slopes to the south.

No residents were evacuated, but officials urged caution, said U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Jolene Cassano. Weather was windy and warm, in the mid-80s.

The fire burned the west wing of the Arrowhead Springs Hotel and destroyed a bathhouse and three other maintenance buildings nearby, Cassano said.

The former resort at the 2,000-foot-level of the mountains is now used by a theology school.

The fire erupted around 11:45 a.m. near Waterman Canyon and state Highway 18, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles.

Louis Blumberg, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said a training burn had been scheduled for the area on Friday. He could not say if the exercise caused the wildfire.

“We have an investigation going right now and we don’t want to prejudice it,” Blumberg said.

“At first I thought it was really gray and cloudy outside, but I stepped out and saw it was a big cloud of smoke rising over the buildings,” said Kathy Sharpe, 48, who manages a steakhouse on Waterman Canyon Road near the hotel.

“It’s an unusually windy day, windier than normal,” she said.

Firefighters were dispatched from the CDF, San Bernardino and Riverside County fire departments.

Dorie Reeder, 40, a manager of a motel in Crestline, said she was confident that the CDF could handle the fire.

“We don’t panic until someone comes to the door and says ’let’s go,”’ she said.

LOS ANGELES — The state plans to hack $61 million from anti-smoking efforts and the first parts to go will be regional centers set up to work with cities, schools and other groups — a move advocates say can only hurt the children of California.

Many of the anti-tobacco programs were doomed when California came up $23.6 billion short. Although the Legislature was still wrestling with the budget going into the weekend, workers at many of the 11 regional centers had already moved furniture out of their offices.

The regional centers — the oldest was 14-years-old — employed advisers who helped cities, counties, schools and community groups with questions, campaigns, studies and other anti-tobacco campaigns.

“This will drastically hurt our efforts to continue to reduce smoking,” said Paul Knepprath, vice president of government relations of the American Lung Association of California. “We have low smoking rates for kids, but it doesn’t stop tobacco companies from swooping in and getting youngsters addicted by fancy advertising.”

Ken August, spokesman for the Department of Health Services, said he doesn’t expect the cuts to cause an increase in the number of California smokers.

“I would agree that California success is based on three main parts, one of which is the great work done on the local level,” he said. “Although California is looking at budget belt-tightening, California has gone through fundamental change in smoking.”

After the cuts, California will still be spending more on anti-tobacco efforts than any other state, August said. The state has been a leader when it comes to smoke-free restaurants, stadiums and workplaces, he added.

There was $134.5 million set aside in the 2001-2002 budget for tobacco education and cessation, but only $88.3 million has been tentatively allotted for the coming fiscal year, August said.

That drop is compounded by a decrease in money from 1988’s Proposition 99, which imposed a 25-cent tax on every pack of cigarettes, because fewer cigarettes are being sold.

The state plans to continue programs that target young adults and smoking cessation such as the California Smokers’ Helpline, August said.

“We hope we don’t see an upswing in smoking,” said Patricia Etem, executive director of L.A. Link, one of the 11 regional centers. “Even the department knows that strong coalitions at the local levels are essential. If we weren’t here, there’s no impetus for the city to make sure the laws are enforced.”

One of the most successful programs run through the centers involved students and youth campaigns.

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Environmental Protection Agency can set limits on pollution of rivers from logging and agricultural runoff.

The ruling upholds a federal judge’s interpretation of certain provisions of the 1972 Clean Water Act that the EPA began enforcing in 1991 because of pressure from environmental groups.

Those provisions allow the EPA to force states to come up with ways to reduce pollution in rivers and waterways contaminated solely by runoff, as opposed to industrial waste or sewage. Before 1991, the EPA set pollutant limits only on discharges from “point sources,” like drain pipes from sewage systems and industrial plants.

The EPA says runoff or “non-point source” pollution has become the leading threat to water quality in the United States.

States decide how to achieve the limits, through restrictions on logging, road-building and other practices that cause erosion and chemical runoff. States can lose federal funds if they fail to require reductions.

Farming groups in the case decided Friday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals argued that the government was only authorized to limit pollution from industrial waste and sewage systems.

The suit was filed by two Mendocino County landowners who were joined by the American Farm Bureau Federation and state and local farm organizations.

The landowners, Guido and Betty Pronsolino, managed forest property along the Garcia River in southern Mendocino County, one of 17 rivers on California’s North Coast classified as “substandard” by the EPA in 1992. The agency said the river’s coho salmon and steelhead populations have been severely damaged by sediment from many years of logging.

When the Pronsolinos sought a logging permit, they were required to reduce erosion, including leaving certain large trees uncut.

The couple said the measures, which would cost them $750,000, were not required under EPA guidelines. The appeals court disagreed.

SACRAMENTO — A Republican senator is hoping the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that school vouchers are constitutional will jump-start a movement to get vouchers passed in California.

Following Thursday’s ruling, Sen. Ray Haynes, R-Riverside, introduced a bill that could pave the way for parents to start receiving publicly funded coupons that could be used to pay for private school tuition.

In its 5-4 ruling upholding a tuition-subsidy program in Cleveland, the Supreme Court said vouchers are constitutional if parents retain a wide choice of where to send their children.

Opponents had argued that since the overwhelming majority of private schools have religious affiliations, voucher programs result in state funding going to church schools.

Haynes said in a statement that the Supreme Court’s decision “finally ends the debate over whether offering our families true choice is somehow a violation of the Constitution.”

Haynes admitted that a bill introduced this late in the legislative session will have a difficult time making its way through both houses.

But time is not all that is working against Hayne’s voucher bill. California voters have twice rejected school vouchers, including a 2000 ballot measure that would have authorized $4,000 vouchers to allow as many as 6.6 million California children to attend private schools.

California Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin said Thursday that she doesn’t think the ruling will affect California.

“California is not a voucher state,” she said. “When you start giving money to private schools, you have to hold them to much higher standards. Some private schools don’t even want to be in that game.”

But Haynes said he expects this bill, unlike his three previous attempts to get vouchers approved, will gain support from lawmakers.

xSACRAMENTO – A former technology aide to Gov. Gray Davis has admitted that he brought up the subject of campaign contributions with a salesman for a Silicon Valley company seeking a state contract.

Vin Patel, who was fired as Davis’ interim e-government director Wednesday, says he brought up the fact that the company’s founder had made a contribution to former Republican gubernatorial candidate Richard Riordan.

“I casually mentioned it to him, but I didn’t have the intention of creating any type of link” with the contract, Patel told the San Jose Mercury News. “If I did do something I apologize.”

An unidentified source told the newspaper that Patel went on to suggest that the company, BEA Systems, wouldn’t be getting the contract.

“I think he said words to the effect: It doesn’t look like we’ll be doing business with BEA,” the source said.

A spokesman for BEA, Kevin McGuirk, said the company didn’t get the contract.

“Vin Patel had publicly admitted to making a comment to our salesman about a ‘donation his boss made to Richard Riordan.’ We think this speaks for itself,” McGuirk said Friday.

It’s the second time that a former Davis aide has been accused of putting pressure on a technology company about campaign contributions.

Elias Cortez, the suspended director of the state Department of Information Technology, told a legislative committee last week that Patel’s predecessor as director of e-government, Arun Baheti, contacted an official with the Oracle Corp. to complain about campaign contributions to Republicans.

Baheti said the allegations were an “absolute falsehood” and challenged Cortez to produce some evidence.

Baheti was fired after he acted as an intermediary in delivering a $25,000 campaign contribution from Oracle to Davis. Administration officials said the move violated a rule barring aides to the Democratic governor from accepting campaign donations.

The donation was delivered to Baheti by an Oracle lobbyist a few days after the Redwood Shores company signed a $95 million, no-bid contract with the state last May.

The deal was supposed to save the state up to $111 million through volume purchasing and maintenance of database software, but the state auditor says the agreement could end up costing the state up to $41 million more than if it had relied on its previous software supply arrangements.

Oracle strongly disputes the auditor’s conclusions.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that California agencies have signed more than 200 contracts for amounts of $2 million or more without competitive bidding since Davis took office in January 1999.

The contracts range from $4.7 million in public relations services for the California Children and Families Commission to $14 million worth of temporary nursing services in state prisons.

Davis has ordered a ban on most new no-bid state contracts worth at least $100,000. The executive order will remain in effect until the state adopts regulations to ensure “open and competitive bidding to the greatest extent possible in awarding state contracts,” the governor said.

Davis has also told former Sacramento County District Attorney Steve White, now the inspector general of the state Youth and Adult Correction Agency, to investigate contracting procedures on state technology projects.

SACRAMENTO — An Assembly committee killed a bill Friday that would have required food processors to disclose levels of artery-clogging trans fatty acids in processed foods.

The bill, by Sen. Debra Bowen, would have taken effect in January 2005 and would have been nullified if the federal Food and Drug Administration created nationwide labeling requirements.

The measure got only two votes in the Assembly Agriculture Committee, with five members voting against it and eight members abstaining.

The labels would have included the amount of trans fatty acids — also known as trans fat — which is the product of hydrogenation. That’s the process of adding hydrogen to liquid oils to solidify them in order to add shelf life and flavor stability to food.

Food processors opposed the labeling because it would create a California-only label and would be a distributing nightmare, said Jeff Boese, chief executive officer of the California League of Food Processors.

“I haven’t heard any opposition to the idea, the problem has been separate labels,” Boese said.

The FDA has been debating trans fat labeling for six years, but has yet to require food processors to disclose how much trans fat is in foods.

“It’s death by delay there,” Bowen said, referring to the FDA’s lack of action. “And in the meantime, there’s actual harm being suffered by Californians not getting the information they need about what’s in their food.”

Trans fat is found in small amounts in some meats, but more often is found in convenience and fast foods like doughnuts, french fries and chips, said Elisa Odabashian of Consumers Union, a supporter of the bill.

Two kinds of fat contribute to high cholesterol — saturated fats and trans fat. Saturated fats are already included on food labels, but it takes a savvy consumer and a calculator to figure out the level of trans fats, she said.

Trans fat is worse than saturated fat, Odabashian said, because while saturated fat increases cholesterol, trans fat increases bad cholesterol and at the same time it decreases good cholesterol.

Many lowfat food products boast that they’re low in saturated fat, but they often have high levels of trans fat, she said

“Californians shouldn’t hesitate to call the manufacturers of the products and ask them why they’re not disclosing this information voluntarily,” Bowen said.

The bill was supported by the American Heart Association, the California Dietetic Association, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

It was opposed by the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, the California Grocers Association and the California League of Food Processors.

OAKLAND – An Oakland man appeared in federal court Friday on charges he mailed an envelope containing white powder and a threatening letter to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft during last year’s anthrax scare.

Dean Wilber, 33, was arrested Thursday at his home. He is charged with threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction — anthrax — after allegedly mailing the letter from Wyoming while on a cross-country bus trip.

The letter prosecutors allege Wilber sent caused an anthrax scare at a Cheyenne, Wyo. post office, where it burst during processing. Workers at the facility were treated with antibiotics in case the substance contained real anthrax, as several letters to government officials did.

The powder turned out to be talcum, but federal authorities and U.S. Postal Service officials saw no joke in the hoax.

“It was traumatic. There was a natural fear that this was the real thing,” said Carol Rookstool, Cheyenne’s postmaster. “We waited a full 36 hours until the tests were absolutely accurate.”

Prosecutors say Wilber was traveling from Maryland to the San Francisco Bay area on Dec. 17 when he mailed the letter from Laramie, Wyo. Wilber was easy to track down because he signed his name, Rookstool said.

Wilber was being held without bail at county jail in Dublin. He was expected to be transferred to Wyoming early next week for an arraignment, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Cheyenne.

SAN DIEGO — A group of teenagers who attacked five Mexican farm workers were sentenced Friday to terms ranging from four months in a youth detention camp to time in adult prisons in a case that caused widespread outrage and became a test for a state juvenile justice initiative.

Judge James Milliken rejected defense lawyers’ requests to sentence the teens as juveniles, citing the severity of the July 5, 2000, attack on the men in a San Diego canyon.

“The fact that this behavior is possible is a sad commentary on the community,” Milliken said. “I, for one, feel we have to tell the community that we are not going to put up with it.”

Four teens sentenced Friday were part of a group of eight who, according to prosecutors, hunted down and severely beat the farm workers in a racially motivated attack. They used clubs, steel rods and BB guns to assault and rob the men at their encampment near the nursery where they worked.

The four pleaded no contest to charges that included assault with a deadly weapon with a special hate-crime allegation, robbery and elder abuse. The victims were in their 60s at the time.

Three other teens who pleaded no contest to similar charges and one who pleaded guilty are scheduled to be sentenced July 23.

The most lenient sentence handed down Friday, 120 days in a youth camp, went to Morgan Victor Manduley, 17, who the prosecutor called the “least culpable” in the attack.

Manduley was the lead plaintiff in a challenge to Proposition 21, the 2000 state law that allows prosecutors to try juveniles as adults for violent offenses without a judge’s approval.

In April, the state Supreme Court upheld the voter-approved initiative. Milliken said that even though he didn’t support the measure, he was obligated to abide by it during sentencing.

Jason Wayne Beever, 16, was ordered to serve 180 days in a youth camp. Both Beever and Manduley were given five years of probation and ordered to attend a class on racial sensitivity and perform 200 hours of community service.

Two other defendants who prosecutors said played more serious roles in the attack — Adam Mitchell Ketsdever, 18, and Bradly Hunter Davidofsky, 17 — were ordered to serve 90 days in an adult state prison. After that time, their cases will be reevaluated and Milliken could sentence them to as much as 15 years in prison. He could also send them to county jail or release them.

Michael Anthony Rose, 17, was scheduled to be sentenced Friday, but his case was postponed until July 23 to enable lawyers to determine whether he is eligible to be sent to the California Youth Authority because he was younger than 16 at the time of the crime.

During much of the proceeding, Manduley and Beever could be seen crying as they say in the jury box, accompanied by their lawyers. The three other defendants showed little emotion, other than to bow their heads occasionally.

Two of the victims, Anastacio Irigoyen, 71, and Alfredo Sanchez, 64, were in court and listened to the proceeding through an interpreter. Facing the two men, Manduley said: “I would really like to apologize to all the men involved in this incident.”

Ketsdever, whose actions prosecutor Hector Jimenez had called “sadistic,” also apologized, saying, “I am truly sorry for what I’ve done and I hope that some day I might make it up to you and your families.”

Jimenez called Davidofsky the “most responsible” for the attack. “I think Mr. Davidofsky deserves to go to prison,” he said.

The attack sparked strong reaction across San Diego. Latino organizations called for harsh punishment of the teenagers, who come from the relatively affluent neighborhood of Rancho Penasquitos. Manduley’s father is a Navy commander who is a Cuban immigrant.

In reaction to the sentences, Luis Natividad of the Latino/Latina Unity Coalition of San Diego said: “We’re satisfied that they didn’t get off. ... They should do some time.”

A civil lawsuit filed against the boys’ families ended in January with agreements to have about $1.4 million divided among the victims, who were legally employed at the nursery.

Irigoyen, who now lives in La Paz, Mexico, said he feels lingering effects from the attack. “They left me there for dead,” he said. “They should be punished as adults.”

In speaking to the court, Sanchez said he still has five BB pellets embedded in his body, including one below his right eye and two in his ear. “I want justice according to the law,” he said.

When police found Sanchez after the beating, he was in a fetal position in his hut and unable to come out. “The defendants admitted they shot the hell of him,” Jimenez said.

“It is completely upsetting that these young men could be so callous, that they could treat these men like animals,” he added.

SACRAMENTO – A state senator investigating the state’s energy crisis said Friday that Enron Corp. used secret Internet sites to communicate about California energy trades.

Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Santa Ana, said investigators uncovered the Web sites in electronic data Enron gave to the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Price Manipulation of the Wholesale Energy Market.

The committee will hear testimony from its information technology consultant on Wednesday, Dunn said, about the sites and about alleged destruction of other electronic data that investigators have discovered.

The committee subpoenaed the e-mails of some top Enron officials, which Dunn said were destroyed.

Other data on the electronic submissions from Enron show the existence of “secret third-party Web sites” that traders may have used to shield transactions “outside the scope of any subpoena,” Dunn said.

At the hearing next week, Dunn said he will also show evidence that “links certain municipal utility systems that were Enron’s partners in those transactions.”

Some of the municipal utilities have “profit-sharing agreements” with Enron, he said.

LOS ANGELES — A seventh-grade teacher who suffocated a rabbit triggered a Superior Court lawsuit by a group seeking to force the Los Angeles Unified School District to change its policy on animal experimentation.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund said it filed suit Thursday after failing to persuade the district to change its policy voluntarily.

“Our concern isn’t to go back and punish anyone,” said attorney Mitchell Wagner. “The ALDF is not one of these radical interest groups. It wants the school district’s policies to comply with the law.”

Godwin Collins Onunwah was a seventh-grade teacher at Gage Middle School in Huntington Park when he placed the rabbit in a plastic bag and tied the bag shut in front of his students in September 2000.

When the animal didn’t die of asphyxiation, authorities said, Onunwah placed the bag in a cabinet and left it there over the weekend. When he returned to school on Monday the rabbit was dead.

Jurors acquitted him of animal cruelty charges last year, ruling he didn’t act maliciously. The school district did not renew his teaching contract, however.

School officials declined to comment on the lawsuit Friday, saying they had not seen the complaint.

State law allows students to decline to participate in activities where an animal might be harmed.

Wagner said the district sends parents a blanket disclaimer at the start of each school year, but he said the law also requires individual teachers to give notice to parents at the time of the specific activity.

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal appeals court on Friday ordered a trial to determine if the California Highway Patrol discriminates against minorities when it comes to promoting officers.

In doing so, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a federal judge who, during pretrial stages of the case, found that there was discrimination and too few minorities at high-level positions.

The appeals court said data the aggrieved CHP officers submitted did not properly indicate there was discrimination, and ordered the case to proceed to a trial with new data. A CHP spokesman said the department was mulling its legal options.

The case, which has bounced through the court system and never gone to trial, was filed in 1993 by a black officer who claimed he was passed over for a promotion because of his race.

No trial date has been set.

The highway patrol is also the subject of allegations it discriminates against minority motorists on highways.

SAN FRANCISCO — The glossy passenger train that slid into this city’s Caltrain depot to the fanfare of a brass band Friday can’t hustle as quickly as the bullet trains of Japan and Europe.

But its backers say the “baby bullet” trains will nearly halve the 90-minute commute between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and could persuade up to 30,000 drivers to ride the rails rather than sit on congested highways.

Politicians including Gov. Gray Davis and state Sen. Jackie Speier joined transportation planners to herald the new locomotives and cars, which won’t open to the public until late 2003. Upgrades to accommodate the new trains are the largest rail improvement project in Caltrain’s 139-year history.

“We’re trying to get you to work faster and get you home quicker,” Davis said.

Speier, a San Mateo Democrat who championed the project in the Legislature, said new transportation options are crucial as California’s population grows.

Caltrain has drawn as many as 10 million passengers annually. The 77-mile system runs through Santa Clara, San Francisco and San Mateo counties.

The express trains will cost $55 million; it will cost an additional $110 million for new and upgraded track, new signals, a new station and other improvements, according to Caltrain estimates.

The state’s Traffic Congestion Relief Program chipped in $127 million, said Jayme Maltbie, a spokeswoman for the rail system. Additional funding came from federal grants, passenger fares and money from government agencies along the route.

The express trains will be able to dodge some stations along the way and pass slower trains on new tracks. Though they can reach 95 mph, the speed limit along the corridor is 79 mph, and the new trains typically will go around 70 mph. Current trains must stop too frequently to go 70 mph for an extended stretch.

That speed pleased Alex Cano, a Caltrain instructor engineer who helped guide the train Friday on its voyage from San Jose.

“It’s the difference between night and day,” he told reporters from his perch in the train’s nose.

SAN DIEGO – She was once a KGB operative, a Russian emigre who seduced an FBI agent into passing a secret document to the Soviet Union.

Now the woman who pleaded guilty to espionage against the United States in 1985 has gone over to the other side.

Court documents released this month show that Svetlana Ogorodnikova worked as an FBI informant — wearing a wire to tape conversations with a woman accused of having a San Diego private investigator kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Mexico.

Ogorodnikova, who served 11 years in prison on espionage charges, is expected to testify for the prosecution in a trial scheduled to start June 18.

“It is truly ironic,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the FBI agent, Richard Miller, in one of three trials.

Miller, who was arrested in 1984, was the first FBI agent charged with espionage. The case attracted widespread attention and embarrassed the government.

The congressman wasn’t surprised to find Ogorodnikova working for the FBI.

“She wasn’t ideological,” Schiff said. “She always struck me as a disconnected person who really has no purpose other than her own survival.”

Ogorodnikova’s lawyer says her client hasn’t been promised anything for her testimony. In fact, she spent four months in jail in the past two years because her meetings with the FBI violated her parole when they were not reported to her parole officer, said attorney Stanley Greenberg.

The San Diego case has nothing to do with espionage.

Kimberly Bailey of Fallbrook is accused of having Richard Post kidnapped, tortured over five days in Tijuana, and then murdered because she believed he cheated on her with other women and stole money from her business.

Bailey has pleaded innocent to conspiracy to murder a person in a foreign country and other charges. Through her lawyer, she has insisted that Post is alive and in hiding.

Ogorodnikova, who was released from prison in 1995, is a key witness in the case. Federal prosecutors in San Diego said the Russian was friends with Bailey and covertly taped conversations in which the defendant allegedly admitted having Post killed.

Bailey’s lawyer, Richard DeMassa, claims the FBI asked Ogorodnikova to befriend his client. Federal prosecutor Barbara Major declined to discuss the meeting of the two women in detail.

Ogorodnikova emigrated to the United States in the 1970s and settled in the Los Angeles area.

She has spent years fighting a deportation order, but the final resolution was unclear. Federal prosecutors and her lawyer said they did not know her legal status. Karen Kraushaar, a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, declined to comment.

Ogorodnikova admitted having an affair with Miller to obtain classified documents for KGB agents based at the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. Miller, an overweight agent with a history of disciplinary problems, claimed he was doing a reverse sting operation.

The first trial of the FBI agent ended in a mistrial when the jury deadlocked. He was convicted of espionage at a second trial, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. In 1994, he was convicted again. He was released from prison after serving two-thirds of a 13-year sentence.

Despite her earlier confession, Ogorodnikova, in the second and third trials, claimed Miller was innocent and had only recruited her to help catch Soviet spies in the United States.

While the details are unclear, Ogorodnikova met Bailey in the summer of 1999, according to the court documents. At the time, the FBI was investigating the disappearance of Post, whose body has never been found.

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court recently reinstated a defamation suit by Suzuki Motor Corp. against the publisher of Consumer Reports.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling 2-1, said a jury should determine whether New York-based publisher Consumers Union of United States Inc. rigged its testing for a published report labeling the Suzuki Samurai “not acceptable.” The magazine first reported in 1988 that the Suzuki “rolls over too easily.”

Two years ago, a Santa Ana federal judge dismissed the case, ruling that Suzuki had not sufficiently supported its claim that the magazine acted maliciously to damage the reputation of the sport utility vehicle.

But the appeals court ruled that a jury should weigh for itself allegations the magazine rigged the driving test to reach a predetermined conclusion, and that it published its results with reckless disregard as to whether they were true, wrote Judge A. Wallace Tashima.

Tashima also said a federal jury should consider whether the magazine’s motives were profit driven, given that it reprinted its original 1988 story in fund-raising solicitations while it was in “substantial debt.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency declined a petition to declare the vehicle defective and said the magazine’s test procedures for the Suzuki “do not have a scientific basis,” Tashima wrote.

In dissent, Judge Warren J. Ferguson said there was not sufficient evidence for the case to proceed. Blocking a trial, Ferguson wrote, was “necessary to both avoid the inhibition of free speech by the media and to protect public safety and health.”

The magazine is considering asking the court to reconsider, or may request the U.S. Supreme Court review the ruling.

“The First Amendment guarantees the right to report our independent findings, even when our judgment differs from that of the government or the company in question,” said Jim Guest, president of Consumers Union.

Suzuki attorney George Ball said the court’s decision means the magazine “will now have to answer in court for the false charges it has spread and continues to spread regarding the Suzuki Samurai sport utility vehicle.”

Suzuki’s United States headquarters is in Brea. It no longer markets the Samurai vehicles in the United States.

LOS ANGELES – The chief executive officer of the area’s veterans affairs health care system has been suspended from duty while federal officials investigate possible misconduct on his part.

Investigators would not elaborate on the case against 51-year-old Philip Thomas, who was reassigned to a VA office in Long Beach. No criminal charges have been filed, said Barbara Fallen, a West Coast VA spokeswoman.

Sources told the Los Angeles Times that the investigation is centered on a worker’s-disability claim made by Thomas. They said the suspension was ordered in late April.

Thomas was named head of Los Angeles veteran health care services three years ago. He was charged with finding a resolution over development of a 388-acre site west of the San Diego Freeway.

His suspension comes two days after Gov. Gray Davis announced plans to build a state nursing home for veterans at the site.

The project, supported by state Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, D-Culver City, drew criticism as veterans in Ventura County and Lancaster said that a new home could cause such facilities planned for their areas to be scaled back.

STARKVILLE, Miss. — Across the country, a barely detectable Southern flavor spices local TV weather forecasts, up to a third of which are delivered by former students of Mississippi State University.

Meteorologists are one part TV star, one part scientist, and Mississippi State takes pride in producing forecasters who can do both parts equally well.

“That is our claim to fame — producing people who do TV weather and who are hopefully a little more prepared than Willard Scott,” says director Mark Binkley, the program’s director who says NBC’s semiretired weatherman is more a personality than a meteorologist.

The American Meteorology Society, which gives out a seal of approval that’s often advertised on local news programs, says about 25 percent of forecasters it approves are MSU-educated. Keith Westerlage, director of on-camera meteorology at The Weather Channel, said up to a third of the nation’s forecasters have ties to Mississippi State — when you add in the people who study through its distance-learning program.

Behind the university’s formula are two professors — one for the science, one for everything else.

He may urge students to have more inflection in their voice, less movement in their eyebrows. And if asked, he might quietly advise weight loss to improve job chances.

Beyond that, Verno says: “I have to let students develop their style. It’s not my place to say, ‘You’re going to be the serious weathercaster and you’re going to be the more comical weathercaster.”’

Verno’s partner, Mike Brown, handles the science.

The two pride themselves on producing students who are technically sound.

TV weather has evolved over the years, from a straight-laced presentation in the 1950s and 1960s, to a personality-driven approach in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, stations have pushed for forecasters with a solid meteorological background.

The American Meteorology Society sets the national standards for broadcast meteorology. It judges both education and communication skills.

“We’re really not supposed to be experts in on-air talent,” says the AMS’ Kelly Garvey. “We pretty much like to judge the scientific ability of the person, but because it’s so important for the broadcaster to relay the message to the public, we have the tape grading.”

Garvey said the AMS awards about 80 seals each year. Mississippi State’s 25 percent take is not matched by any other school, she said.

The university’s influence is so wide because of its video and Internet distance-learning program, which takes three years of study at 15 hours a week. About 1,400 students have graduated since 1987.

It has helped some of the highest-profile forecasters in the country. About a quarter of The Weather Channel’s 30 on-air forecasters have a Mississippi State pedigree. The program is popular because it gives midcareer people a way to advance while continuing to work, Westerlage said.

Bob Stokes, seen on The Weather Channel Saturday through Tuesday mornings, said the program was “wonderful.”

“You had to study for this stuff. It’s not something you just walk in without cracking a book,” Stokes said. “Some of the more successful and outstanding broadcast meteorologists have gotten their education at MSU.”

Many weather schools teach more hard-core science than Mississippi State and are more likely to fill private and government jobs, as with the National Weather Service.

Fred Carr, director of the University of Oklahoma’s school of meteorology, says many schools offer a weather broadcasting emphasis, but not the intensive course Binkley and Mississippi State have.

“Mark, I’ll have to give him credit, he’s put Mississippi State on the map with that program,” Carr said.

Binkley says research shows TV audiences pick a news channel based on their weather coverage.

“When it’s a high of 92 and a 30 percent chance of showers, they’re all going to say the same thing,” he said. “The days that there is severe weather is when you find out who your best person is. And the only way to be good in severe weather is to know your meteorology.”

FORT WORTH, Texas – They broke in broncos on their ranches and dangled from galloping horses in Wild West shows and Hollywood flicks.

Often overlooked in history books, women who helped tame the West — and others sharing their pioneering spirit — are riding high in the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame.

Their tales of grit and grace are being told in the new $21 million, 33,000-square-foot building, set to open next weekend in Fort Worth’s cultural district.

“These women are great role models — often ordinary women who did extraordinary things because they had to get done,” said Patricia W. Riley, the museum’s executive director. “These are inspirational lessons whether you’re 6 years old or 60.”

Among this year’s five inductees is Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who plans to attend the museum’s Friday ribbon cutting. The El Paso native, whose 1981 appointment made her the first female Supreme Court justice, grew up on her family’s ranch straddling the Arizona and New Mexico border.

Pam Minick, a champion team roper and a 2000 Cowgirl Hall of Fame inductee, said museum visitors may be surprised by some of the 400 women featured — from Lewis and Clark’s American Indian guide Sacajawea to bootmaking businesswoman Enid Justin.

“The common thread, whether they’re a cowgirl at heart or a competitor, is perseverance and looking at obstacles as a stepping stone,” said Minick, also the first woman rodeo announcer in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. “It’s hard to put into words how proud I am to be part of it.”

The museum, billed as the world’s only museum dedicated to documenting women’s contributions to the American West, came from the humblest of beginnings in 1975 in Hereford, near Amarillo.

When the town planned to host an all-women rodeo, resident Margaret Formby thought there should be a museum honoring cowgirls. She stored a growing collection of photos and memorabilia — sent from rodeo stars and families of Western pioneer women — in the Deaf Smith County Library basement.

The museum opened in a donated house six years later, but by the early 1990s Formby and others decided it needed more space in a larger city. Nearly three dozen cities lobbied to be the museum’s new home.

Ultimately, the choice was Fort Worth, dubbed “Cowtown” decades ago because it was a frequent stop for cattlemen traveling along the Chisholm Trail.

However, the museum has not had a permanent home since moving to Fort Worth in 1994, so the collection has been in storage while organizers raised $21 million from donors and planned the project. The new museum is set to open to the public June 9, two days after the ribbon-cutting ceremony and a day after a parade featuring many Hall of Fame inductees.

The brick building near a horseshoe-shaped plaza features a mural of women on horseback. Inside, several motifs — wild roses, horse heads and ropes — adorn the light fixtures, columns and stair railings.

The museum includes a multipurpose theater with 54 leather-tooled seats, three exhibit galleries with interactive and educational exhibits to showcase about 2000 artifacts, a research library, gift shop and a room for traveling exhibits.

Names of the Hall of Fame inductees are on illuminated stars along the first-floor walls of the rotunda, where glass-tiled murals along the second-floor level depict faces and scenes that slowly shift.

In the ranch gallery, visitors can see a day in the life of a cowgirl. It features pictures taken by ranchers nationwide who were sent disposable cameras by the museum. Artifacts include a split skirt and a side saddle.

The arena gallery tells stories of rodeo stars through the years, from trick rider Tad Lucas and sharpshooter Annie Oakley to cutting horse champion Sheila Welch. Visitors can see costumes, saddles and rodeo programs.

“We wanted to make sure people have access to their stories and be inspired by them,” Riley said.

NEW YORK — The walls of Jonathan Safran Foer’s apartment are covered with everything from a framed piece of blank paper from Susan Sontag to random sketches made by his friends. There is even an enormous canvas of a huge hand that the author himself painted.

“Pretty much everything up there is an accident — things I’ve picked up along long the way,” he says.

So goes the story of Foer’s life: Things just sort of ... happen.

A native of Washington, D.C., he found himself at Princeton University, where he majored in philosophy, and took some writing classes “for fun.” He wound up winning the freshman, sophomore, junior and senior Creative Writing awards.

One summer, Foer hopped on a plane and headed out to the Ukraine for four days, in search of the woman who hid his grandmother from the Nazis during World War II.

He did little research before his trip and never found the woman. So, he made up a lot of things and wrote a novel, “Everything Is Illuminated.” The book just happened to make the 25-year-old Foer the hottest young writer in publishing.

Houghton Mifflin paid nearly $500,000 to acquire the manuscript and HarperCollins purchased the paperback for $925,000. Actor Leiv Schreiber is hoping to direct a film version of “Everything Is Illuminated,” which quickly made The New York Times’ best seller list in May.

“It becomes very frustrating when other people think that you are successful or happy,” he says. “It’s almost as if they don’t take me seriously. Because, if you really took me seriously you would know that the things that are important to me are a lot bigger than money or getting good reviews.”

“Everything Is Illuminated” is a three-pronged novel.

It begins with correspondence between Alex, a Ukrainian, and the main character, coincidentally named Jonathan Safran Foer. Alex is to be Foer’s guide as they search for his grandmother’s old shtetl.

Then there’s the story of Alex and Jonathan as they travel through the Ukraine with Alex’s nearly blind grandfather and Alex’s dog, Sammy Davis Junior Junior.

Foer then weaves in a historical narrative of life in the shtetl from 1791 until 1942.

He is a slight man with a mop of dark, curly hair and soft black eyes. He speaks quietly but eloquently, choosing his words carefully as if savoring delicate morsels of food.

“I can be very hard on myself,” he says. “I convince myself that I’m fooling people. Or, I convince myself that people like the book for the wrong reasons.”

Others are eager to praise him. Houghton Mifflin editor Eric Chinski says that the book had an “amazing blend of energy and wisdom.”

“It was that rare combination of being stylistically risky but the acrobatics served a purpose,” Chinski says.

CLE ELUM, Wash. – Five Yakima residents have been arrested for investigation of identity theft after a customer tried to open a bank account here using false identification.

A clerk at Sterling Savings Bank, trying to turn on the branch’s security camera, triggered the security alarm instead, bringing police to the bank Tuesday.

“It’s a good thing she accidentally triggered the burglary alarm because otherwise we probably would not have caught them,” Police Chief Brennen Milloy said.

A search of a vehicle and a hotel room in Ellensburg turned up credit cards and checkbooks in a variety of names, computer equipment to make checks and three ounces of methamphetamine.

Robert Pauley, Richard McPherson, Nicole Stoops, Janie Cable and Lisa Teders were arrested for investigation of identity theft, second-degree theft of credit cards, possession of stolen property and possession of methamphetamine. Stoops also was booked for investigation of forgery.

NEW YORK — The masterpieces of the Museum of Modern Art are now in Queens.

“The space here has a certain ‘rawness’ that makes the art come off the walls in a potent way,” museum director Glenn Lowry said Wednesday, as he inaugurated MoMA’s temporary move to a former Swingline staple factory.

Pablo Picasso could not have imagined when he painted his groundbreaking “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907 that this icon of cubism would end up across the street from a Queens envelope warehouse and down the street from a Dominican diner.

The museum, which first opened its doors 72 years ago, was forced to move from its midtown Manhattan address on West 53rd Street for a $650 million expansion project. The site will be closed through 2005.

MoMAQNS — the name of the bright blue converted staple factory — officially opens to the public on Saturday.

In this industrial Queens neighborhood, the museum’s stark white walls and 21-foot black ceiling frame cavernous, odd-shaped galleries, with a white metal ramp leading to the gift shop.

It seems the perfect space for a green 1950s Jeep — part of an exhibit called “AUTObodies” that also includes a 1990 Formula 1 Ferrari.

“Tempo,” featuring contemporary art from around the world, examines time in everything from clocks to watches and metronomes. A DVD creation shows a couple locked in a long, slow kiss that seems to defy time.

But MoMA’s reputation rests on the truly timeless treasures of modern art, many of them now gracing a series of new galleries with a cracked concrete floor and the sign “To Be Looked At.”

Museum officials want to make sure their famous works really do get seen — even at a location that would not normally draw Manhattanites or tourists.

Last Sunday, one attention-grabber was a procession of reproductions of famous MoMA works from Manhattan across the Queensborough Bridge to MoMAQNS on 33rd Street in Queens. The art was enhanced with Peruvian music and brightly colored costumes.

The real works are now in place — part of MoMAs collection of more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings. MoMA also owns about 14,000 films, and 140,000 books and periodicals.

MoMAQNS remains as audacious — and provocative — as its Manhattan parent.

In a gallery close to the masterpieces, a man’s leg protrudes through a wall, in shoes and a pant leg. It seems all too real. This, too, is MoMA’s art, an untitled 1991 work by American Robert Gober, who made it with cotton, wood and steel — and real human hair on the wax “skin” just under the cuff.

“There are relationships that normally occur in museums, where collections are organized well,” said Lowry, the director. “Here, it’s a little looser — and it works. In here, some of that shocking power of art gets refreshed.”

Special Enforcement Unit makes 20 arrest of alleged drug dealers in west and south Berkeley in one night; Chief says more are soon to follow

Residents of west Berkeley gathered Thursday night to hear details about the arrest of 20 suspected drug dealers individuals for trafficking narcotics and to discuss ways to continue to clean up their neighborhood.

The meeting was attended by longtime neighborhood residents, city officials and members of the Berkeley Police Department. It came as a result of concern within the community over drug activity and related violence and theft. Though residents were hopeful that the recent arrests would mitigate drug activity in the neighborhood, many felt more work needs to be done.

“I think the ball has started rolling. We’re only going to work harder,” said Erik Upson, Beat Officer for the BPD in west Berkeley. According to Upson, the department has been focusing first and foremost on drug dealing in the west Berkeley neighborhood bordered by San Pablo Avenue to the east, Dwight Way to the south and Bancroft Avenue to the north.

“Most of the problems come from drug dealing activity - vandalism, violence, traffic, the general perception of disharmony,” said Upson.

The 20 arrests come after a three-month surveillance operation conducted by the department’s Special Enforcement Unit, a unit formed to reduce illicit behavior. The department secured 42 indictments from the Alameda County Grand jury resulting in arrest warrants for individuals involved in the sale of narcotics. According to Police Chief Dash Butler, efforts are under way to find the remaining individuals with outstanding warrants.

A Police Review Commission Community Forum was held Wednesday night at the same sight, Rosa Parks Elementary School, with most residents defending the BPD. Community members at Wednesday’s meeting claimed that drug violence plagued West Berkeley not police brutality.

Many of the same concerns carried over to Thursday’s meeting as residents asked officials what could be done on a community wide basis to lessen drug activity and violence. Officials emphasized that the police can not control the situation alone and urged residents to be watchful and to work with the police.

City Manager Weldon Rucker addressed the need for all city officials to participate in neighborhood issues. “We need a partnership between the city and the community. If we are creative and innovative we can come up with solutions with you. The entire city government has to step forward,” said Rucker.

The issue of holding property owners responsible for the tenants they house was also discussed.

“We need to work cooperatively with property owners, to set community standards and live a quality life,” said Rucker. “We have to ask ourselves how do we reach the demands when the community is raising the bar. We have to reenergize and reinvigorate ourselves.”

Councilmember Margaret Breland, who lives near 10th and Allston, an intersection highlighted at the meeting for high drug activity, helped organize Wednesday’s forum.

Breland noted that activity had decreased recently but that things have a way of repeating themselves.

According to Artensia Barry, a resident of west Berkeley for the past 8 years, community members need to communicate and work together to solve these problems.

“There’s no communication between community members. You can live on the same block for 20 years here and you don’t know your neighbor’s name,” said Barry.

Barry suggested that residents need to take steps to inform each other of problem. Residents also discussed the need for bilingual officers from the BPD to communicate with and involve the Hispanic population in the neighborhood in community action.

“We can’t do it alone. Our task is to mitigate some of the violence. It has to be a balanced approach with the treatment and prevention programs coupled with the hard-core crackdown,” said Butler.

While I know the whole community probably most enjoyed his tireless efforts to stamp out public nudity, my favorite part of retiring chief of police Butler's era is his 1991 campaign to make People's park safe for volleyball. The bullets, the mass arrests, the dogged efforts to frame local activists may have cost Berkeley taxpayers millions of dollars, but we have priceless memories instead to share with our children.

I personally want to thank Butler and ex-City Manager Michael Brown for the accusation of assault they made against me after tackling me and dragging me out of a City Council meeting, while I quietly waited for my opportunity to speak. Channel 5 news footage exonerated me, it's true, but I'm sure I'm not the only Berkeley taxpayer who found the trial thrilling enough that it was worth every penny.

Dee Dee Bridgewater didn’t have to go all the way to Poland to discover German theater composer Kurt Weill.

After all, she’d already covered his signature song – “Mack the Knife” – on her Ella Fitzgerald tribute album, and she’d already played the first African-American Sally Bowles in “Cabaret,” a play reminiscent of Weill’s work.

But if she hadn’t gone to Poland, the jazz singer and Broadway actress wouldn’t be dazzling Yoshi’s audiences this week with a full program of “theatrical jazz” for the club’s 30th anniversary celebration, and the Bay Area wouldn’t be “Gettin’ Weill’d.”

Bridgewater discovered the breadth of Weill’s work when she performed at the modernist songwriter’s 100th birthday commemoration in Wroclaw, Poland in March, 2000. She’d conquered the worlds of jazz (for which she’s won two Grammy awards) and theater (a Tony for “The Wiz”), but was still unprepared for the way that Weill tribute would energize her, creatively.

“Every song was treated completely differently,” Bridgewater said during a break from her world tour, speaking from Toulouse, France. “The orchestrations went from a hard rock to an opera with strings, to a kind of cabaret to a punk rock number…And what amazed me was that even though these women were singing in German or in Polish, and even though I didn’t understand what they were saying, I was just mesmerized.”

Bridgewater soon immersed herself in Weill’s repertoire, and now she’s hooked. “I’ve just fallen in love. I love this man’s music,” she says.

Bridgewater and Weill came together in an oddly elliptical way. Weill began his career in Germany in the 1920s, fled the Nazis to Paris and then New York in the 1930s, and found success on Broadway in the 1940s. (Weill died in 1950.) Bridgewater retraced Weill’s steps in reverse: She starred on Broadway in the 1970s, toured France with the musicals “Sophisticated Ladies” and “Lady Day” in the 1980s, settled down near Paris, and this spring introduced German audiences to the late Broadway works of Weill, completing the circle.

European theatergoers could not be happier. Although Weill and his German writing partner Bertolt Brecht are quite familiar to Europeans, many of the Broadway songs – written with American lyricists like Ira Gershwin and Alan Jay Lerner – are new to them. Bridgewater and her all-star European jazz ensemble packed opera houses from London to Istanbul. Bridgewater offered a select Continental run-down of audience reactions:

Bridgewater is eager to see how American audiences will respond. Many of her European fans couldn’t understand the English lyrics, so Americans might take even more from the show. “I’m quite excited,” Bridgewater said.

Bridgewater is also glad to be returning to the theater, in a sense; she performs each song in the show as “a little vignette,” having worked with arrangers to give each one a different “musical personality.”

This is not entirely new territory for the singer, who’s spent much of her career fusing jazz and theater. She played the lead in the reworked opera “Carmen Jazz,” and was nominated for England’s coveted Laurence Olivier Award for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in “Lady Day.”

What is new is that Bridgewater is now creating theatrical music, rather than the more familiar musical theater. Critics and fans alike have reveled in the jazz singer’s lively performances, but some have questioned where the musician ends and the actress begins. Bridgewater hopes “Getting’ Weill’d” makes things clear.

“I feel like I finally have found a music that expresses all of me,” Bridgewater said. “So I can pull up the theatricality, and it’s not too much; it makes sense in this context.”

Weill also gives Bridgewater a range of emotion – not to mention vocal dimension – that she’s found lacking in some of her other material: “I’d about had it with these light, kind of trite, cute songs; the pop songs of the ‘30s and ‘40s. I wanted more substance. This music, for me, is perfect. Because it’s very challenging musically, vocally, harmonically.”

The lyrics are also more complex than Bridgewater’s usual standards.

“The stories are richer. The melodies are richer. It’s just more intelligent,” Bridgewater said.

Most of the songs are culled from Weill’s Broadway period, such as “Speak Low” and “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” from the play “Touch of Venus.” Unfortunately, Bridgewater won’t be signing many copies of “This is New,” because it won’t be released domestically until August 6. (The European version can be purchased online now.) She’ll be back in the States this fall for a full national tour.

Bridgewater committed to play as part of Yoshi’s 30th anniversary celebration before her album’s final release date changed. She kept her date as a “sneak preview” series because she considers Yoshi’s to be “family.”

Bridgewater also loves the acoustics of the club where she recorded her Grammy-nominated live album, “Live at Yoshi’s.”

“That little jazz club is the best club in the U.S. o f A. Bar none,”Bridgewater said.

Coming from a woman who’s filled in for Ella Fitzgerald at the Montreaux Jazz Festival and wowed audiences from Carnegie Hall to Paris’s Olympia Theatre, that’s strong praise, indeed.

The St. Mary’s High girls’ track team won its first North Coast Section title last weekend. This weekend at the state meet in Cypress, the Panthers’ focus will be more on individual accomplishments.

Heading the field for St. Mary’s will be their four stellar senior girls and Solomon Welch. Senior Danielle Stokes is probably the Panthers’ best hope for a win in Saturday’s finals, as she goes into the 100-meter hurdles with the fastest time in the state, a blazing 13.90 in last weekend’s final. But four others ran sub-14.10 in regional action, including Stokes’ rival Talia Stewart of James Logan High, so a win is anything but assured. Stokes will also run the 300-meter hurdles and likely the anchor leg of the 4x100 relay.

Tiffany Johnson will take part in four events, the most of any athlete: the 100-meter dash, long jump and triple jump, all of which she won at the NCS meet, as well as the relay. With stiff competition in the sprint from the southern schools, it will be an accomplishment for Johnson to reach Saturday’s final; ditto for the jumps, where it will take a strong effort from the St. Mary’s senior to finish in the top 10.

Kamaiya Warren will throw the shotput for the third straight time at the state meet, but her focus will be divided with her entry in the discus, which she missed last year. Warren set a personal best in the discus last weekend and should be in the top five in both events.

Rounding out the senior quartet is distance runner Bridget Duffy, who will run the 3,200 and 1,600. She finished second in the shorter race at the NCS meet, which produced the top three qualifying times in the state.

Welch qualified for the long jump, triple jump and 110-meter hurdles, but will forgo the hurdles race to concentrate on his jumps. The senior specializes in the triple jump and beat his previous best by more than a foot last weekend, so he’s clearly in top form. His mark was less than six inches behind state leader Demetrius Ragland of Tulare Western High, so with a little improvement Welch could be a state champion.

The St. Mary’s relay teams, a traditional strength for the program, continued their success at the NCS meet, with the girls qualifying in the 4x100 relay and the boys winning spots in both events. The boys’ win in the 4x400 at the NCS meet was the school’s seventh straight victory in the event.

The Berkeley Unified School District still needs to cut $2.5 million to balance next year’s budget, according to new figures released at the Board of Education meeting Wednesday night.

The new deficit figure marks a $2 million jump over projections provided at last week’s meeting, when Associate Superintendent of Business Jerry Kurr predicted a $450,000 shortfall.

District officials said last week they accidentally counted $900,000 in funds from the Berkeley Schools Excellence Project twice, artificially inflating the district’s balance sheet and leading to the erroneous deficit projection.

The Excellence Project is a special local tax that funds class size reduction, instructional materials, maintenance, and other items in the Berkeley schools.

The BSEP error also lead to inaccurate projections of the 2003-2004 deficit. Last week, Kurr said the 2003-2004 shortfall will be $4.4 million. Wednesday night, he bumped up his projection to $7.3 million. Kurr is predicting a $12.9 million shortfall in 2004-2005 if the district doesn’t make cuts.

Berkeley Unified, relying in part on one-time infusions from block grants, the state lottery and awards for standardized test performance, is projecting an $880,000 surplus for the current year.

The district presented the new figures as a part of the “third interim report” on the budget. The board voted unanimously to provide a “negative certification” on the budget, as it did with the first and second interim reports, acknowledging that the district will be unable to meet its financial obligations next year without more cuts.

But board members, noting they have already made enough cuts to reduce next year’s shortfall from $5.4 million to $2.5 million, remained upbeat.

“I actually see a light at the end of the tunnel,” added board member John Selawsky. “I think we’re getting there.”

Superintendent Michele Lawrence, in an interview with the Planet, acknowledged that Berkeley Unified will carry a deficit into next year, squashing hope that the district would finish making cuts this year.

The district is required to file a fiscal recovery plan at the end of June. Lawrence said the district will likely identify school property in the plan that it could sell to make up next year’s shortfall. But the superintendent said she does not intend to actually sell the property.

Instead, she hopes to watch the numbers shake out in the next couple of months and then make recommendations, possibly in august, for further programmatic and personnel cuts.

“I’m looking at this as a buying of time,” Lawrence said, referring to the identification of properties for sale in the June recovery plan. “I’m of the Scarlett O’Hara school – never sell the land.”

School board candidate Nancy Riddle said there is some disappointment in the community that the district will not finish cutting by June.

“There was great hope that we could make the cuts this year and start on an even keel next year,” she said. “So there’s great sadness.”

But Riddle praised the district for combing through its programs this year and making a host of difficult decisions already.

The Alameda County Office of Education, which has jurisdiction over Berkeley Unified, rejected last year’s budget, in part because the numbers were in disarray.

County Superintendent Sheila Jordan said she expects this year’s budget to be in proper shape and foresees county approval.

But while the numbers may be in proper order, the district will still face a deficit, Jordan said, and the county intends to keep in place the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state body that has advised the district on its finances since October.

In the long run, Jordan noted, the district will have to develop internal controls that will last after FCMAT leaves.

“We’ve been really focused on working with them to develop sustainable systems,” she said.

District officials say conversion to a new data system, scheduled for July 1, will go a long way toward establishing long-term internal controls.

What's immoral and unconstitutional about "hate crimes" laws? Just about everything.

They decree which favored or feared groups will receive special treatment, declare certain thoughts to be thought crimes, and force what should be agencies of fair even-handed justice to engage in mind-reading. Those in favor of these concepts ought to go someplace where they'll see what it's really like to live under them, like the US or USSR of 1953, South Africa of 1960, Afghanistan of 2000, or today's North Korea. Or at least read "1984"--probably for the first time--until they understand it.

Overt actions or statements that are more dangerous to society than such laws, such as assault, making terrorist threats, battery, and planting bombs, are well-covered by existing laws. And those who want laws protecting them from ever having their feelings hurt should be advised to quit whining, grow up and deal with it.

CONCORD — Hot, soulful jazz, pop and funk will heat up the hills of Contra Costa County on June 22, as one the Bay Area’s most prized up and coming vocal artists, Shana Morrison, joins California State University, Hayward’s Concert in the Hills series.

Located at the university’s beautiful Contra Costa campus in Concord, the entertainment begins at 7 p.m. The free concert series continues monthly through October.

Shana Morrison is part of a new generation of rock performers whose electrifying elements of pop, soul, jazz, and funk blend exquisitely to perform great original songs. Her powerful voice alone is enough to pack the Contra Costa campus as well as being recognized by many as Van Morrison’s daughter.

Shana began her musical career in December 1993 when she joined Van Morrison’s Rhythm and Soul Revue as a featured artist, and can also be heard on the album “A Night In San Francisco.” She continued to tour in the U.K., Ireland and Scandinavia through 1994. During that time she also recorded a duet with Irish singer Brian Kennedy.

Most recently, she received an ovation from the audience at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion where dad shared the bill with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

For three years now she has been singing in the San Francisco Bay Area with her group Caledonia. Their material borrows from traditional and contemporary Irish folk, rock, R&B, country, and jazz. The group has enjoyed playing to their ever increasing following there, and their self-released CD has gotten favorable reviews, as well as, airplay from such stations as KFOG and KPIX.

Remembering a successful foray into labor relations at Berkeley’s Raddison Hotel two years ago, city leaders are now considering using their political clout to sever a dispute between management and employees of the Claremont Resort and Spa, at 41 Tunnel Rd.

Councilmembers Linda Maio and Kriss Worthington are preparing to ask fellow councilmembers to join them in urging a citywide boycott of the landmark hotel.

Their condemning resolution against the Claremont, which carries no physical sanctions and is merely symbolic, is expected to be put to a council vote June 11, and calls for hotel managers to recognize their employees’ attempts to unionize.

I am very dismayed that you have re-submitted your resolution asking that UCB drop charges against the protesters who disrupted classes and took over a building on the UC Berkeley campus in April. The protesters were arrested because the UC administration believed that they broke the law. Whether or not they are prosecuted and punished will be determined in court.

Jewish students at UCB have been having a very difficult time. They have been threatened, cursed, and derided. The Jewish students have been told that they lack all humanity because they believe in Israel's right to exist. They have been told that they are “European colonialists” who ought to “go back to Europe.”

I was present at a demonstration in which the anti-Israel (pro-Palestinian) demonstrators had a mock trial of Israel's Prime Minister Sharon, who was found “guilty” even though he had no counsel at the mock trial. Pro-Palestinian students screamed epithets at the Jewish students. I witnessed it.

On April 9th, the anti-Israel (pro-Palestinian) protesters held a demonstration in which they broke campus laws, made hateful statements to UCB Jewish students, disrupted classes and took over a building. Not all of the protesters were students and many were off campus trouble makers who use the UCB campus as a political venue for their hate filled anti-Jewish propaganda.

You have submitted a request for support for the April 9th protesters and recommended that the City Council request Chancellor Berdahl to not take away students' opportunity for education and drop the suspensions for the April 9th protest. You also recommended that the District Attorney drop the charges for participating in the demonstration and protest rally.

How can you justify protecting these hate mongers from the consequences of their actions? By dropping charges against them you are saying that it is OK for people to break laws during anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstration and get away with it. This encourages anti-Semites to

take any illegal action against Jews without prosecution.

I was born in Germany and I experienced at first hand the consequences of police inaction against people who committed crimes against Jews.

On Kristallnacht, in November 1938, mobs demonstrated against Jewish businesses and Synagogues and the authorities failed to stop themand prosecute them. This had followed several years of a deliberate policy of allowing civilians to persecute Jews. In 1933 there was a boycott of Jewish businesses and harassment of Jewish businesses and institutions and organizations. The governments did nothing to stop this behavior. Little by little the populace became bolder and bolder in its harassment of the Jews. By the time that the Nazis started arresting

Jews (I was arrested myself on Kristallnacht in Munich at the Jewish Old Aged Home where my father was the physician) there was no outcry.

I see this same process starting here. Demonstrators harass Jews on campus and openly break laws yet you introduce a resolution to the City

Council asking the Chancellor to drop charges against these hooligans. I cannot understand how you can say that criminal conduct should go

unpunished when that it is precisely what you are doing. The fact that the criminal conduct was committed by anti-Israel demonstrators

suggests that you would allow these anti-Israel demonstrators to have carte blanche in persecuting Jews.

If you have a sense of history and decency, please drop this resolution.

On May 31, 1962, World War II Gestapo official Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel for his role in the Nazi Holocaust.

On this date:

In 1819, poet Walt Whitman was born in West Hill, N.Y.

In 1889, more than 2,000 people perished when a dam break sent water rushing through Johnstown, Pa.

In 1910, the Union of SoutEvery ambitious man is a captive and every covetous one a pauper.” — Arab proverb.

In 1913, the 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, was declared in effect.

In 1961, South Africa became an independent republic.

In 1970, tens of thousands of people died in an earthquake in Peru.

In 1977, the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, three years in the making, was completed.

In 1989, House Speaker Jim Wright, dogged by questions about his ethics, announced he would resign. (Thomas Foley later succeeded him.)

In 1991, leaders of Angola’s two warring factions signed a peace treaty, ending a 16-year-old civil war.

In 1994, the United States announced it was no longer aiming long-range nuclear missiles at targets in the former Soviet Union.

Ten years ago:

An estimated 50,000 people demonstrated in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, against Communist-organized elections. “Crazy for You” was named Broadway’s best musical at the Tony Awards; “Dancing at Lughnasa” was named best play.

Five years ago:

Pope John Paul II began an 11-day tour of his native Poland, his seventh visit since assuming the papacy.

One year ago: Veteran FBI agent Robert Hanssen pleaded innocent to charges of spying for Moscow. (He later changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.) Moderate PLO leader Faisal Husseini died at age 60. Actress and TV personality Arlene Francis died in San Francisco at age 93.

xA new kind of theater that thrusts real life movingly onto the stage will premier in Berkeley for the first time.

Don’t expect "The Laramie Project" or "The Colour of Justice," in which professional actors mouth what people said months or years ago. The Soapstone "actors" are the actual participants in the harrowing stories they tell, as if Matthew Shepherd could be summoned from his bleak Wyoming grave to bear witness to his victimization.

"This is just so powerful!" exclaimed Ruth Morgan, director of Community Works, a Berkeley-based non-profit organization committed to building fellowship through art and education.

The company that walks this daring tightrope is called Soapstone Theater, and its genesis is just as surprising as its method. It grew out of the criminal justice system. Roberto Gutierre Varea, its director, had been teaching theater at the San Francisco County Jail for about a year when he got the chance to help five male ex-offenders develop a drama based on their experiences. The result, "Smoke and Mirrors," played to packed houses in various venues, including San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral.

This led Soapstone to invite women to work with them. That collaboration gave birth to "(Un)common Ground," which proved equally successful. A third project, "Boxing with Ghosts: 8 Tales of Death and Resurrection," just had a 3-night run in San Francisco, where leaders of Berkeley’s Domestic Violence Program saw it.

As Morgan related, "They were so excited, they contracted to bring it here."

Though the criminal justice system may seem focused on punishment, Soapstone Theater offers a hopeful sign of other means. Supported by the Sheriff’s Department, it aims at healing. Its actor/playwrights are male ex-offenders and women survivors of violence, who, as Varea says, "explore the impact violence has on perpetrators and survivors alike."

But they don’t confine that exploration to the narrow bounds of self, but offer it to their community, in an act of what Ruth Morgan calls "restorative justice."

Soapstone hopes art can redeem victims, victimizers and society, too.

In "Boxing with Ghosts" we meet real people, Elijah, Mauryne, Raja, Walter, Jennifer, Ophelia, Juanita, Derrie. Survivors of addiction and anorexia, child abuse and prison riots, they don’t disguise their names or pull punches with the truth. Instead they offer their tales with scrupulous and moving honesty, describing what went down, while we witness their testimony in an almost tribal way.

"We believe this builds community," Morgan said. Are we in the audience free of failure and loss? Aren’t we sometimes victimizers and victims, too? "We see our likeness in them,"Morgan said.

But can art really heal? As one recovering addict says of his participation, "This play has helped me do a lot of healing. Yeah, it’s really hard on us, but it’s important for us to tell other people, I just want this to work."

Another says, "Now I have a chance to be that loving, caring young man my grandmother always told me I could be."

Tickets are $8 to $15. Sponsored by the California Arts Council and the City of Berkeley, it plays at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut Street, once only, on May 31, at 8 p.m.

SAN FRANCISCO — Some music fans are trying to fake out CD copy protection technology with the stroke of a felt-tip pen.

The tactic is being used in Europe, where Sony is trying out a copy protection method. That model won’t be coming to America, the company says.

The crack in the copy protection is the talk of the town on Internet message boards, though Digital Audio Disc Corporation, Sony Corp.’s CD manufacturing unit, is not amused.

“Consumers should be aware that attempting to circumvent copy control by writing or attaching anything to the disc can result in permanent damage to the disc, and possible damage to the playback device,” Sony DADC said in a statement last week.

All five major recording labels are in trials with various copy protection schemes, mostly in the European market.

Word of cracks in Sony’s copy protection first surfaced on a German Web site, www.chip.de. The new technology is contained on all of Sony’s CD latest releases in Europe from performers including Celine Dion, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez. The protection is supposed to thwart users from ripping CD tracks to MP3 files by placing a small bit of computer data on the disc.

WASHINGTON — Plant-eating dinosaurs of different species may have herded together, to escape meat-eaters nearby, according to an analysis of 163 million-year-old dino footprints on a muddy coastal plain in England.

In a study appearing Friday in the journal Science, British researchers say that 40 tracks of dinosaur footprints hint at a life and death struggle between prey and hunter in the days when dinosaurs ruled the world.

The tracks suggest that large and lumbering plant eaters of different types — some as long as 90 feet and weighing 10 tons or more — walked together across an open tidal plain, perhaps fleeing for their lives. These animals were all sauropods, but of different types.

On a nearby track, the researchers also found the footprints of the smaller, faster Megalosaurus, a toothy meat eater that may have been more than 60 feet long. The tracks were going the same direction at about the same time as the sauropods. The Megalosaurus was a theropod, the same family as Tyrannosaurus rex, a heavyweight carnivore that developed millions of years later.

“The theropods there suggests that they were tracking the sauropods,” said Julia Day, a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, England, and first author of the Science study.

Day said the tracks of the sauropods show they were miles from the nearest heavy growth of plants, which was unusual because it is believed the huge vegetarians required food almost constantly.

“Sauropods have to keep eating and yet they were far away from any vegetation,” said Day. “We believe the animals were either migrating or walked out there to get away from the predators.”

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Highway Patrol today was criticized by civil rights groups demanding an investigation into the arrest of an 11-year-old Palestinian girl they allege was “brutally attacked” when an anti-war demonstration on the Golden Gate Bridge soured Saturday.

“In our mind the CHP has committed a hate crime against a child of color,” said a member of the Arab-Anti Discrimination Committee at a news conference outside the CHP San Francisco office this afternoon. “It's a severe blow to the sense of security and sense of safety of the ethnic community.”

Los Gatos fifth-grader Sophia Ibrahim was arrested on felony assault of a peace officer after she allegedly took a swing at a CHP officer trying to shuttle the unruly crowd off the bridge before the demonstration's permit expired. The groups allege four officers pinned the girl to the ground, leaving her with bruised wrists and ankles from restraints, as well as deeper psychological wounds.

“That girl was assaulted in a ridiculous abuse of power by the CHP when she was simply exercising her constitutional right to protest,'” a member of Bay Area Police Watch said. “They violated her First Amendment rights.”

CHP spokesman Wayne Ziese said officers used “reasonable restraint” against the girl that at the time they estimated to be about 16.

Ziese said her ethnicity was not taken into account, and she was arrested for the alleged assault which the groups deny occurred.

Around 30 others were arrested that day, mostly for obstructing the bridge walkway and resisting arrest, at was intended to be a peaceful demonstration opposing U.S. military policies in Afghanistan and the Middle

East. Ibrahim's brother, 21-year-old Mousa Ibrahim, was also arrested for felony child endangerment for bringing the girl to the demonstration.

“As a parent, if I were going to take a child to an event where such a disruption is possible and things start to go sideways, I would remove that child from the scene right away,'” Ziese said.

The CHP says the demonstration organizer, All's People Coalition to Stop U.S. Terror and Occupation, had a permit for the protesters to march across the bridge on the eastern walkway from San Francisco to Marin County and back again between the hours of noon and 2 p.m.

But by 1:35 p.m., the group had not yet completed the first leg of its journey, so bridge officials requested that the CHP order them to turn around and vacate the bridge immediately. Around 150 officers from various agencies were at the scene; around the same number of protesters were in attendance.

The law enforcement action angered the protesters, who argued that the permit had not yet expired and that there was no need for the CHP to respond armed with batons and pepper spray. The marchers said that it was bad judgment by the CHP that caused the conflict and brought bridge-bound traffic to a standstill for hours.

Ziese said batons and pepper spray are a necessary defensive

measures used to protect the officers.

At Friday's news conference a coalition of civil rights organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American Civil Liberties Union, called for a full investigation into the incident and for the officers who arrested young Ibrahim to be reprimanded.

They additionally want the CHP officers to undergo sensitivity training that focuses on communities that are the targets of hate crimes.

Further, they want the CHP to use community input to re-evaluate their crowd control policies for dealing with peaceful demonstrations.

Ziese said the CHP's policies were reworked and approved by a citizens oversight committee after the Rodney King riots in the early 1990s.

The groups have not contacted the CHP about their demands, Ziese said, and have only made complaints to the media thus far.

“Once we receive a complaint, from the organizations or the family, we would launch an investigation,” Ziese said. “We have not received a complaint.”

Data track on European music discs prevents use on PCs, but simple defeat discovered by users

SAN FRANCISCO – Amid Internet message board reports that Sony’s copy-protection scheme for CDs released in Europe easily can be defeated with a felt tip pen, the corporation is warning consumers against using the new hacking tactic.

Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation, Sony Corp.’s CD manufacturing unit, said in a statement that users trying to thwart the copy-protection scheme risk ruining their CDs and their playback devices.

“Sony DADC is aware that consumers are trying to circumvent copy-control technology with different means, which may lead to different and unpredictable results in different environments,” Sony DADC said on May 22. “Consumers should be aware that attempting to circumvent copy control by writing or attaching anything to the disc can result in permanent damage to the disc, and possible damage to the playback device.”

Word surfaced on a German Web site, www.chip.de, that some music fans and technology tinkerers successfully had faked out Sony’s copy protection by marking the music CDs with a felt tip pen or attaching small pieces of paper to the disc.

Sony’s recent European CD releases from artists such as Celine Dion, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez contain Sony DADC’s copy-protection method, marketed as key2audio. The system normally prevents users from ripping CD tracks to MP3 files by placing a small bit of computer data on the disc during the process of making the glass master CD.

Then, instead of recognizing individual audio tracks, a computer reads the data track and ignores the audio tracks, preventing PC playback of the music. Only standalone devices such as home stereos and portable CD players can recognize and play the audio tracks on the discs.

By obscuring the data track with a felt pen mark or a piece of opaque adhesive paper, protected discs like Dion’s have been made playable and copyable on home computers.

The copy-protection scheme on Dion’s latest CD, “A New Day Has Come,” purchased in Berlin, easily was defeated by using the felt tip marker method. An ink line drawn across the copy-protection data portion of the CD allowed the disc to be copied digitally.

But the original CD then no longer worked in a standard CD player.

Sony Music Entertainment labels have yet to unleash copy-protected CDs in the U.S. market, content so far to practice on Europeans until they perfect the system. The problem in much of Europe is not MP3 trading via file-sharing networks such as Morpheus and Gnutella, but CD duplication to blank discs.

Sony plans to sate U.S. consumer appetites for digital-format music by including condensed copy-protected song files alongside the regular song files. That will allow users to play the CDs on their own computer, but not to copy music onto the hard drive or share it over the Internet.

“When copy-protected CDs are introduced in the United States, they will contain second sessions technology so that computer playback will be possible,” a Sony spokeswoman said.

CD players in home computers normally use a laser to read “pits” containing data on the disc. But copy-protection schemes interrupt this normal performance by sending instructions to the computer not to play the discs.

The soundtrack to the movie “The Fast and the Furious,” released by Universal, contains a warning label that each track is protected against unauthorized copying. Once the CD was placed in a PC CD tray, a small software audio player encoded onto the music discs popped up on the monitor and began to play the first track.

But there was no problem ripping the tracks to unprotected MP3 files using the popular MusicMatch software, despite the warning label.

Universal uses technology from Tel Aviv, Israel-based Midbar called Cactus Data Shield, or CDS. Midbar described the defeat of its CD protection as rare, though it was done using both MusicMatch software and Microsoft Windows Media player, two of the more common tools for ripping and encoding music into compressed digital formats.

“As a security company, Midbar does not comment on specific titles. It should be noted however, that CDS is a renewable and regularly updated technology. In the extremely few cases where someone does successfully rip one track or more, it is because of a specific drive and software combination,” said Noam Zur, Midbar’s vice president of sales and marketing. “There is no universal hack to circumvent CDS technology.”

SACRAMENTO – Oracle Corp. is defending its software deals with California and other states after being accused of misleading customers about the costly contracts, a newspaper reported.

Officials from Toronto to Atlanta are scrambling to get out of their agreements with the Redwood Shores-based software company, the San Jose Mercury News reported Thursday.

The state of Georgia forced Oracle to renegotiate a major software deal after state officials concluded they would not save as much money as Oracle promised.

In Toronto, city officials are trying to shed a $13 million deal that they say burdened them with thousands of database licenses they don’t need.

In Ohio, state officials pulled the plug on an Oracle deal after they decided the company had inflated the state’s need for software.

Oracle, which currently is working with state officials to void California’s deal, refused to comment for the newspaper’s story. A call to the company Thursday was not immediately returned. Oracle, however, has pointed

“Oracle has a long tradition of aggressive sales and pricing tactics,” said Betsy Burton, an analyst for Gartner, a Connecticut-based market research group that has been critical of Oracle. “But the fact is that today they are losing business to Microsoft and IBM because of their tactics.”

Assemblyman Dean Florez, the Bakersfield Democrat leading the legislative inquiry, said Wednesday he plans to hear testimony next week from other states that have had run-ins with Oracle.

The state of California for decades has relied on Oracle database software to track data from criminal justice records to payrolls. But the company’s efforts last year to sell the state on consolidating its software purchases have come under increasing scrutiny.

Last month, the state auditor concluded that the $95 million to $123 million contract, initially promoted as a way for California to save more than $100 million, could cost taxpayers millions of dollars for unneeded software.

Oracle vehemently has denied it did anything improper, and points to its own analysis of the contract that shows it could save California taxpayers more than $100 million over the next decade.

PALO ALTO – Still facing hard times, computing giants Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc. will close shop during the week of Independence Day and require employees to go without pay or use up vacation time.

Shutting down from June 30 through July 6 in the United States will contribute to “operational savings,” HP spokeswoman Judy Radlinsky said Thursday, though she would not elaborate on the amount. Palo Alto-based HP has 74,000 U.S. employees and 150,000 overall.

HP executives decided on the plan after getting “good feedback” from former employees of Compaq Computer Corp. about its closure during the holiday last year, Radlinsky said. HP acquired Compaq on May 3.

Sun is instituting a similar plan that same week, spokeswoman Diane Carlini said. The Santa Clara-based company, which has 32,000 employees in the United States and 39,000 overall, also closed over the Fourth of July week last year.

Both companies still will count the Fourth of July as a paid day off.

The cost-cutting moves come as the technology industry remains in a slump. A report released Thursday by Merrill Lynch said corporate technology spending is essentially flat this year.

The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons recently published statistics that illustrate the dangers of ladder accidents.

• In the United States more than 500,000 people a year are treated for ladder-related injuries, and that number does not include people who suffered injuries but did not go to a medical care provider for treatment.

• About 300 people in this country die from ladder-related injuries annually.

You can avoid becoming one of these statistics by having the right ladder for the job and using it properly.

The notion that ladder safety begins when you place your foot on the first step is wrong. Ladder safety really begins when you shop for a ladder – a daunting task considering all the choices.

First is ladder style – step or extension? Often you will need both. A stepladder can be used indoors and outdoors, but has height limitations. An extension ladder is used primarily outdoors where extra height is needed, as in the case of a two-story home. An extension ladder can be useful indoors where unusually high ceilings exist.

Next is size. When it comes to ladders, size matters. For stepladders, the ladder’s height plus 4 feet equals the total reach. For example: a 4-foot ladder can be used to reach an 8-foot ceiling. Use a 6-foot ladder to reach a 10-foot ceiling, and so on. For an extension ladder, the base and upper sections must overlap. So, a 20-foot extension ladder is only good for about 17-feet. The ladder must travel above the roofline 2- to 3-feet so that it can be used for balance as you climb.

Ladders are sold by “duty rating” – how much weight a ladder is rated to carry. The more weight it will hold, the stronger it must be. The American National Safety Institute (ANSI) establishes duty rating. The five duty ratings and their respective load capacities are as follows: Type IAA special duty – 375 pounds; Type IA extra heavy duty – 300 pounds; Type I heavy duty – 250 pounds; Type II medium duty – 225 pounds; and Type III light duty – 200 pounds. When in doubt, always err on the side of a heavier duty rating.

The final step in choosing a ladder is construction material. The choices are wood, aluminum and fiberglass. The oldest and most familiar ladder is wood. Wood ladders have a solid, sturdy feeling. However, the fact that they are heavy makes them a bit cumbersome and somewhat difficult to transport. Also, wood must be regularly maintained to prevent cracking, splitting and rotting. Wood is economical and is said not to conduct electricity when clean and dry. If you do lots of electrical work, we suggest that you choose a fiberglass ladder.

Ladders made from high-strength aluminum are a lightweight, rot-free alternative to wood. But aluminum ladders have been around long enough to prove that they don’t last any longer than wood. Salt air or chemicals can corrode – and weaken – an aluminum ladder in no time.

Fiberglass has become as popular as aluminum was when it first replaced wood. Fiberglass ladders are lighter than wood but heavier than aluminum. They aren’t subject to rot, they don’t bend easily and they come in several attractive colors. Manufacturers say that they will last generations – just what they said about aluminum. We know that plastics and resins oxidize in the same fashion as all other carbon-based materials. Only time will tell whether fiberglass will last longer than the others.

Choosing the right ladder is only part of the safety equation. Proper use and maintenance will help ensure that you don’t become one of the unfortunate statistics that we mentioned earlier.

Always read and abide by the instruction labels and stickers on a ladder before setting foot on it. Failure to do so could have devastating consequences. Make a thorough inspection to be sure it’s safe and in good working order. There’s no excuse for using an unsafe ladder. Even a perfectly good ladder can be unsafe if not used properly.

Here are some rules and a few tips that could help prevent a ladder accident in your home, and perhaps serious injury:

Rule 1: Never use a worn-out ladder. In some instances they can be repaired, but more often than not, it is advisable to get a new one.

Rule 2: Never use a ladder unless it is rated to carry your weight. Ladders are rated by the amount of weight that they can carry. If the salesperson at the store can’t tell you the weight that the ladder is capable of carrying, find another store.

Rule 3: Use a ladder that is the right length for the job. For stepladders, the ladder’s height plus 4 feet equals the total reach. And that warning at the top, “this is not a step,” means just that. For an extension ladder, the base and upper sections must overlap. So, a 20-foot extension ladder is only good for about 17-feet. The ladder must travel above the roofline 2- to 3-feet so that it can be used for balance as you climb onto the roof.

Rule 4: Rest the ladder properly. Don’t rest the high leg on a block of wood or a brick. Instead, dig a hole for the lower leg. Also, don’t stand the ladder up at too little or too great of an angel. The safe angle is about 75 degrees. Remember, too, much angle reduces the ladder’s strength and not enough angle could cause you to tip over backward. Seventy-five degrees is an angel equal to when the minute hand of a clock is directly in between the 12 and the one, or 75 degrees from the three.

LOS ANGELES – The nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese has hired a public relations firm to help deal with the ongoing priest abuse scandal.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles tapped Sitrick & Co., a Century City-based company that has dealt with high-profile cases. The company’s clients have included troubled energy company Dynegy Inc., Global Crossing during its bankruptcy, actress Halle Berry following a traffic accident and comedian Paula Poundstone after her child-endangerment case.

The archdiocese was being advised by another public relations firm but church officials hired a new attorney, J. Michael Hennigan, who recommended Sitrick & Co.

“We’re really proud to be involved in this,” said Michael Sitrick, 54. “We’re confident the church is taking proactive measures to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I don’t have to be Catholic to be anxious to help them work through this.”

Cardinal Roger Mahony has tried to stave off questions from the public and media about the priest abuse scandal. More than 30 current or former priests of the archdiocese are now under investigation by law enforcement authorities for alleged sexual misconduct with children.

Hennigan chose Sitrick because the archdiocese “was not doing well in the press. I thought the press was focusing on the very negative aspects without the whole story coming out.

Sitrick said the first order of business will be attempting to separate perception from reality.

“We’re trying to get perceptions to equal reality,” he said. “You can’t do anything about what was, only what is and what will be.”

Church officials did not disclose how much the public relations firm will receive for its work. However, Sitrick charged Orange County more than $400,000 when it dealt with bankruptcy in the mid-1990s.

Church also encouraging public to report incindents of abuse to police

SANTA ROSA – The Santa Rosa Diocese has begun fingerprinting priests and other employees who work with children to identify sex offenders, and is encouraging the public to report incidents of abuse directly to the authorities.

The announcement came Wednesday as part of the diocese’s updated sexual misconduct policy, which also requires background questionnaires from prospective employees and regular church volunteers.

The diocese introduced the fingerprinting some months back, but had not begun to actively implement it until now.

“It’s a priority. It needs to be done now,” said diocese spokeswoman Deirdre Frontczak.

The Santa Rosa Diocese, which stretches from Sonoma County to Oregon, aims to fingerprint all its priests. Frontczak said she hopes a significant number of clergy will get it done at a meeting this June.

Once taken, the prints will be sent to the state Department of Justice for a criminal records check. People convicted of felonies involving child abuse will not be permitted to stay in a position in which they have contact with children.

Six priests from the Santa Rosa Diocese have been publicly accused of molesting children. The diocese has acknowledged paying $7.4 million to settle sex abuse claims.

The Monterey Diocese began requiring fingerprinting of priests earlier this month, but took the policy a step further when it required fingerprinting of volunteers, too.

In Los Angeles, the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese has hired a public relations firm to help deal with the ongoing priest abuse scandal.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles tapped Sitrick & Co., a Century City-based company that has dealt with high-profile cases. The company’s clients have included troubled energy company Dynegy Inc., Global Crossing during its bankruptcy, actress Halle Berry following a traffic accident and comedian Paula Poundstone, who was charged with child endangerment.

The archdiocese was being advised by another public relations firm, but church officials hired a new attorney, J. Michael Hennigan, who recommended Sitrick & Co.

“We’re really proud to be involved in this,” said Michael Sitrick, 54. “We’re confident the church is taking proactive measures to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I don’t have to be Catholic to be anxious to help them work through this.”

Cardinal Roger Mahony has tried to stave off questions from the public and media about the priest abuse scandal. More than 30 current or former priests of the archdiocese are now under investigation by law enforcement authorities for alleged sexual misconduct with children.

Hennigan said he chose Sitrick because the archdiocese “was not doing well in the press. I thought the press was focusing on the very negative aspects without the whole story coming out.”

Sitrick said the first order of business will be attempting to separate perception from reality.

“We’re trying to get perceptions to equal reality,” he said. “You can’t do anything about what was, only what is and what will be.”

Church officials did not disclose how much the public relations firm will receive for its work. However, Sitrick charged Orange County more than $400,000 when it dealt with its bankruptcy in the mid-1990s.

RANCHO CORDOVA – Days after giving up her job as a stripper so her 5-year-old daughter could finish kindergarten at her Christian school, a Rancho Cordova mother pocketed an undisclosed sum to pose nude for Playboy’s Web site.

Officials at Capital Christian School in Sacramento were shocked when they found out Wednesday that Christina Silvas, 24, once again violated the standards of the agreement she had signed. This time though, they said they would not expel her daughter, who has only a week left in the school year.

“This is a big disappointment and a big setback from the path that we appeared to be on,” Pastor Rick Cole told The San Francisco Chronicle afternoon edition Thursday.

The problem erupted two weeks ago when school officials discovered that Silvas was working as a nude dancer at a Sacramento strip club.

Silvas told Cole that she was forced to take the job to pay for the school’s $400 monthly tuition.

Silvas refused to quit when Cole reminded her of the Christian Philosophy agreement she signed. Church officials then expelled Silvas’ daughter with three weeks of school left.

But after Silvas’ plight received national attention, the school allowed her daughter to return. Silvas received numerous job offers and took a job at a morning radio station program in Sacramento. She agreed to quit strip dancing, at least until her daughter could finish the school year.

But this week, Silvas flew to Chicago to shoot her nude Playboy.com centerfold and sit down for an interview.

Silvas told Playboy.com that although she had agreed to quit stripping so that her daughter could return to school, she hadn’t agreed to not pose nude for Playboy.

“Before all of this happened, I was extremely interested in posing,” Silvas said.

FREMONT – State and federal officials have joined philanthropic groups in pledging $100 million to buy 16,500 acres of salt ponds ringing San Francisco Bay, launching the largest wetlands restoration project on the West Coast.

After negotiations led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Cargill Salt agreed to sell the land at 40 percent of its appraised value. The Minneapolis-based agribusiness giant also is responsible for cleanup of the land, which includes 1,400 acres along the Napa River.

“Today we’re taking the first steps to reverse the course of history. Together we will restore an extraordinary but endangered natural resource,” Gov. Gray Davis said in formally announcing the deal Wednesday. “For the last century, we did not do a very good job of protective this resource.”

The plan pools money from state and federal governments, as well as four private foundations, to turn the salt flats into habitat for both endemic species and migratory birds flying between Alaska and the tropics.

Feinstein said Cargill came down in price $200 million from its original demand, in part by removing about 400 acres of salt ponds in Redwood City from the deal.

“At $300 million, we didn’t have a deal,” Feinstein said.

Cargill Chief Executive Officer Warren Staley said the company had been considering restoration for some time, and decided to sell now because the market was soft.

“We looked at the marketplace, which wasn’t as good as it was previously,” he said, adding that the company has not yet decided what to do with those 400 acres in Redwood City.

The bay used to have 190,000 acres of tidal marsh, but the bulk of that land has been diked, drained, filled or paved. Now, only about 20 percent of the marsh survives.

The Cargill land has been involved in salt production since the 1850s, which will mean intensive cleanup of a highly concentrated brine that is toxic in its solid form. Purifying the land could take decades and the cost has been estimated between $200 million and $1 billion.

“Some of these ponds should be relatively easy to restore,” said David Lewis, executive director of Save San Francisco Bay Association. “Other ponds will be more difficult.”

The federal government will chip in $8 million for the project. The state will cover the rest of the costs with four private-sector partners: the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund.

The agencies and charities have pledged $35 million for planning and management beyond the $100 million purchase price.

A Cargill spokeswoman said the company will not lay off any of its 200 employees at its Newark plant and plans to keep producing 650 tons of salt a year on the 11,000 acres it will retain.

“The acquisition is based on land we no longer need for salt production,” said spokeswoman Lori Johnson.

Most of the land is expected to become part of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The rest will be part of a state-run wildlife preserve.

Diluting the ponds and restoring them to healthy marshes will rank as the largest wetlands restoration project attempted on the West Coast, rivaled only by projects to restore the Florida Everglades and Chesapeake Bay.

“The Everglades in Florida is the largest wetland restoration in the country, and this is the largest shoreline restoration that increases tidal wetlands,” said California Resources Secretary Mary Nichols.

The move cleared the way for the Senate to approve its version of the budget 27-12, and for a six-member, two-house conference committee to begin efforts to put together a budget compromise.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Steve Peace, D-El Cajon, said the committee will have to resolve “very substantial differences of opinions,” including how to close a $4.5 billion budget hole.

Democrats want to fill $3.5 billion of that gap with tax hikes, he said. Republicans want more budget cuts.

The Assembly also approved its $99.3 billion version of the budget Thursday, but only after Democratic leaders stripped out appropriations to allow the measure to move to the Senate on a simple majority, 49-28 vote.

The Senate refused to use that tactic and its budget plan stalled initially Thursday two votes short of the two-thirds majority it needed.

But Senate Minority Leader Jim Brulte, R-Rancho Cucamonga, and Sen. Maurice Johannessen, R-Redding, agreed to vote for it after the tax increases were removed. One Democrat, Sen. Ed Vincent, D-Inglewood, was absent from the vote.

Democrats have majorities in both houses but they need at least one Republican in the Senate and four in the Assembly to put together the two-thirds majorities that will ultimately be needed to approve a budget bill.

The chief budget stumbling block for Republicans is increases in vehicle fees and tobacco taxes and a suspension of business loss tax write-offs proposed by Gov. Gray Davis to help close a $23.6 billion revenue shortfall.

Peace warned that if the conference committee didn’t start work soon lawmakers wouldn’t make the June 15 constitutional deadline for putting a budget on the governor’s desk.

There’s no penalty if they don’t pass a budget by that frequently missed deadline, but Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, D-San Francisco, warned that state school aid could be cut off and state employees’ pay cut to minimum wages if a budget isn’t in place by July 1, the start of a new fiscal year.

An appeals court ruled Wednesday that state Controller Kathleen Connell can pay minimum wages to state employees, make payments on state debts and pay judges’ salaries in the absence of a budget.

But the court said the state can’t make support payments to public schools without a budget in place.

Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland, warned Republicans that if they hold up the budget and cripple state government it could backfire on them in the November elections.

“If this body allows the government of the state to be impaired the way the federal government was impaired in 1995, then the public will see its way clear to find out who was responsible,” he said.

“Making operation of the state a partisan rather than a nonpartisan operation does not benefit anyone.”

“This is not partisanship,” replied Sen. Ross Johnson, R-Irvine. “Republicans have been telling you for years that we were on course for a fiscal train wreck. The day of reckoning has come and we’re still waiting for ... a complete budget plan, a budget plan that will work.”

Sen. Richard Polanco, D-Los Angeles, challenged Republicans to offer their own budget proposals. “If you’re not interested in this particular plan then submit where you want the cuts to occur,” he said.

“Let’s get this budget over to the Assembly side. Let’s not sit around here day in and day out.”

Meanwhile, a group of law enforcement leaders urged lawmakers to approve Davis’ proposals, saying they’re worried that deeper budget cuts could hurt efforts to prepare for the possibility of terrorist attacks.

“It’s not a matter of...if, it’s a matter of when for this new war we’re in. So we have to be prepared,” said Redding Police Chief Bob Blankenship.

LOS ANGELES – The head of the nation’s largest sheriff’s department on Thursday delayed plans to release 400 jail prisoners to deal with a $100 million budget cut proposed by Los Angeles County supervisors.

Sheriff Lee Baca, in a budget battle with the board, had said he would release the inmates, who were charged with misdemeanors, starting at midnight Thursday.

The department, operating on a $1.6 billion budget, provides law enforcement for more than 2 million people in a 3,100-square-mile area and runs a vast jail system with 19,000 prisoners. It has more than 8,000 deputies and 5,000 civilian employees.

While intensifying his criticism of county supervisors, Baca said it would go against his “conscience” to release the inmates. He delayed the release until at least July 1.

“I can’t do things with 100 million dollars less money and not affect the way the whole system works,” Baca said.

The inmates that would have been freed were being held on bail amounts of $25,000 or less. They would have been released with orders to appear at their next court hearing.

Baca said the release would save his department $3 million to $4 million.

In a letter written to Superior Court judges earlier this week, Baca said that along with the prisoner release he would be forced to close the Century Regional Detention Center in Lynwood, which can house up to 2,000 inmates daily.

“We have no choice,” said Al Scaduto, chief of correctional services for the Sheriff’s Department. “If we don’t have the funds to operate these facilities, we have no options.”

Supervising Criminal Judge Dan Oki wrote to fellow judges that the court was trying to determine whether Baca has the authority to release inmates once bail has been set.

Scaduto said state law gives the Sheriff’s Department the right to release inmates awaiting trial for misdemeanors.

Some county officials were outraged that Baca would consider releasing accused criminals and suggested other solutions.

District Attorney Steve Cooley responded to Baca’s plan by urging his staff to seek higher bails for defendants who they believe should remain behind bars.

If the budget cuts go through, sheriff’s officials said they also plan to cut staffing and eliminate specialized task forces.

Baca’s predecessor, Sherman Block, released about 3,000 inmates in March 1995 because of budget constraints.

SACRAMENTO – The state’s energy traders and grid operators should be investigated by U.S. attorney’s office to determine if they manipulated California’s energy market, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon said Thursday.

U.S. Rep. Doug Ose, R-Sacramento, appearing with Simon in Sacramento, said Democratic Gov. Gray Davis should give investigators his internal documents as part of any investigation of the state’s energy crisis.

“Open the governor’s office. Let’s see the governor’s calendar. Who did he meet with and what did they talk about? Let’s start at the top,” Ose said.

A state Senate committee is investigating the energy crisis, including the state’s power grid operators at the Independent System Operator. The committee recently released a transcript of ISO officials asking state energy traders to buy unnecessary power at above-market rates, which the state later had to sell at a loss.

The state attorney general is also investigating whether energy suppliers manipulated California’s market.

Simon said his energy plan would include renegotiating the long-term energy contracts the state entered last year, and encouraging new power plant production — both things Davis has undertaken.

Davis announced in April that the state had renegotiated some of those contracts, saving $3 billion, and talks are continuing with other energy companies.

Davis issued executive orders in early 2001 that gave incentives to companies to build power plants. Since then, a dozen plants have began producing power or will be operating by summer.

But Simon said that’s not enough to ensure the state has adequate reserves of electricity.

“Contrary to what Gov. Davis has said, there are not a lot of plants in the pipeline in terms of construction,” he said.

Davis’ campaign spokesman Roger Salazar said Simon has been “as quick to condemn the administration as he is reticent to condemn the energy companies for what they did to California.”

Prop 227 supporters get mandate for abolition of most bilingual education

SACRAMENTO – The State Board of Education approved a new set of rules mandated by Proposition 227, a voter-approved initiative that requires most English-learning students to be taught in English.

Thursday’s vote marked a victory for proponents of Proposition 227 who threatened to sue the board, saying an initial set of proposed regulations would have undermined the measure.

Proposition 227, approved by California voters in 1998, abolished most bilingual education programs and replaced them with English-only courses for students who speak little or no English. Although the measure was approved by 61 percent of the voters, only 37 percent of Hispanic voters supported it.

Roughly 25 percent of California’s 6 million public school students do not speak English fluently.

At the heart of the argument over the board’s regulations was the parent’s right to apply for a waiver that would allow his or her child to be transferred to bilingual education classes that teach students in both English and their native languages.

“Since the passage of Prop. 227, obtaining the waiver has been extremely difficult for many parents,” said Francisco Estrada, spokesman for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “Not all parents are informed of their right to request a waiver.”

Parents who want a waiver must apply for one every school year. But schools are not required to offer the alternative courses unless there are 20 or more students in one grade level who receive a waiver.

Bilingual advocates were pushing to allow teachers and school administrators to apply for the waiver on behalf of the parent.

“At one point the regulations said...educational staff could initiate a waiver request or recommend it to a parent or guardian,” said Phil Garcia, spokesman for the board.

But Ron Unz, author of the initiative, argued that the practice would violate the law and threatened to sue the board.

“That was completely illegal and contrary to the clear language of the initiative,” said Unz.

The board decided to delete the section of the rules that would have allowed teachers to initiate the application process.

“The regulations make clear that educational staff and teachers may still recommend the waiver,” said Garcia.

Board members also dropped a provision that would have required students to go through a 30-day English assessment period only once instead of every year before transferring to bilingual programs.

That’s the current practice but bilingual advocates wanted the board to include it in the rules to clearly state that students should only have to go through the assessment once.

Proponents of Proposition 227 said the students should be required to go through the assessment every school year.

Unz again threatened to sue and the board omitted any reference to the assessment period.

Estrada said the watered-down regulations do little to protect students or a parent’s right to obtain a waiver.

Estrada also said that the board’s decision to avoid addressing the assessment period will be a source of contention later.

Unz, a wealthy head of a financial services software company, is pushing for similar measures in other states. Massachusetts and Colorado voters will face English-only education initiatives in November, while Arizona passed a measure in 2000.

SACRAMENTO – An administrative law judge sided with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Thursday in a dispute with the state Department of Managed Health Care that tests the authority of the 3-year-old department.

The state rejected the ruling, said Director Daniel Zingale, and will appoint an independent hearing officer within the department to determine if it can order an HMO to provide better patient care.

The state’s complaint against Kaiser stems from the 1996 death of Margaret Utterback, who died from a ruptured aortic aneurysm. The DMHC, which regulates HMOs in California, fined Kaiser $1.1 million for failing to provide Utterback with access to care and continuity of care.

The administrative law judge reduced the fine to $25,000 and stated that the Legislature’s purpose in enacting HMO oversight was “fiscal regulation of health plans” and not patient care.

The DMHC “overstepped its authority” by fining the health plan for the quality of medical care, said Dick Pettingill, the president of the California division of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals. Physicians’ are overseen by the state Medical Board, which determined that Utterback’s care was appropriate.

“We don’t disagree,” said Zingale. “Physician conduct isn’t within our purview. The problem was (Utterback) couldn’t get to a physician. By all accounts, once she saw her doctor, he did a good job.”

Since the state rejected the ruling, the $1.1 million fine still stands, Zingale said.

If Kaiser isn’t satisfied with the DMHC hearing, the company can next take the issue to court.

Zingale said the administrative law judge was incorrect in his argument that the law wasn’t intended to guarantee patients’ access to health care, but was about financial solvency of the HMOs.

“The original law certainly had intent language about both financial solvency and health care,” he said. “The judge overlooks the fact that that’s why the Legislature created us. That mystifies me.”

Consumer advocate Jamie Court said the department was right to set aside the judge’s decision because Kaiser had a “systemic problem” that didn’t give enrollees adequate access to care.

SACRAMENTO – School districts will be able to build schools faster under a bill that passed the state Assembly on Thursday, raising alarm among smaller districts that larger districts will get more school construction money.

Written by Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, AB2424 would allow school districts to form school construction authorities to build schools faster and in turn get even more money. It passed the Assembly 50-23.

Goldberg said her plan would let school boards focus on making policy instead of worrying about building schools with their share of the $13 billion that could come if voters pass a proposed bond issue in November.

But small school districts fear they don’t have the resources to create the school construction authorities. The districts are feeling the heat because state school officials estimate that California needs 12,775 additional classrooms and 331 new schools in the next five years.

The bill would require a local school construction authority to be governed by those appointed by the school district and city council. There also would be a member from the State Allocation Board and Office of the Architect. Small school districts would be able to team up with other districts to form the construction authority.

Opinion

Editorials

LOS ANGELES – A 7-year-old boy whose body was found in a mansion pool days after he disappeared drowned accidentally, the coroner’s office said Wednesday.

An autopsy determined that Paolo Ayala died about the time he was reported missing on Sunday, said Craig Harvey, chief of operations for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

The boy, who could not swim, was last seen alive at an afternoon pool party and was reported missing when his parents came to pick him up.

The discovery of the body by a housekeeper on Tuesday following repeated searches of the wealthy Holmby Hills area. That initially led Deputy Police Chief Dave Kalish to suggest the possibility that the body may have been placed in the pool later.

However, Harvey said Paolo died of asphyxia due to fresh water drowning, probably at the time he was first reported missing.

“The death has been ruled by the coroner to be accidental,” Harvey said. “Anatomical findings show no evidence of the body having been removed from the pool prior to discovery.

The ruling left the question of why the body had not been spotted by the 10 adults and 15 children at the party, as well as the many police officers who arrived later.

Kalish said Wednesday that the body apparently was camouflaged by plaster from the degrading pool floor and walls that made the water milky and gave the illusion of seeing the bottom.

“This has been an anguishing case for us,” Kalish said Wednesday. “We desperately wanted to find that child alive.”

“Clearly, obviously we learned from this situation not to rely on what you think you see,” he said.

LOS ANGELES – African-Americans get more television turf than other minorities but pay a price: Black characters tend to be segregated in sitcoms and by network, a study released Tuesday found.

“Despite the large number of African Americans on television, they continue to be ’ghettoized,”’ according to the study from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Black characters were more likely to appear in comedies, with 39 percent of all black characters in sitcoms compared to 31 percent for whites, 23 percent for Hispanics and 21 percent for Asians.

One of the least-watched networks, UPN, was the most likely to feature black characters, the study said. Blacks represent 28 percent of the characters on UPN series, compared to about 12 percent on other networks.

More than half of all black characters who appeared on the screen for more than 10 minutes per hour of programming were on UPN and most appeared on two nights, Monday and Saturday. The latter is the least-watched TV night.

CBS was the network with the second-largest percentage of all African-American characters, 17 percent.

LOS ANGELES – Police searched some of the most expensive real estate in the city Monday for a 7-year-old boy who vanished during a weekend birthday party in Westwood.

Paolo Ayala disappeared from a home pool party in the tony residential area near Beverly Hills shortly before his parents arrived to pick him up at 5 p.m. Sunday, police said.

The missing boy’s father, from Beverly Hills, said his son may have wandered to nearby Holmby Park.

“He is very friendly,” said Franklin Ayala.

He was last seen barefoot and shirtless, wearing only a pair of blue swimming trunks.

Four separate teams of police dogs tracked the boy’s scent south after scouring the house and a nearby park and golf course, said police Sgt. John Pasquariello. The dogs picked up the scent about a mile from the home, Pasquariello said.

PALO ALTO – While unhealthy school meals are prompting legislators around the country to consider laws making them better, some California school districts are hoping to achieve that goal by going organic.

The Palo Alto Unified School District is considering such a switch, following the lead of Berkeley schools that made the move more than a year ago.

The Palo Alto schools held a tasting Friday to determine what organic foods students would eat. The idea is to offer chemical-free ingredients, and fresh, locally grown, organic fruits and vegetables to children.

Alicia Michelson, a fifth-grader at Ohlone Elementary School where the tasting was held, tried the organic strawberries, macaroni and cheese, and rice.

“I think it was better than what we usually have,” she said. “I think we should have more organic things, because it’s better for our health.”

Students placed paper clips in one of three tubs marked “yummy,” “OK” or “yuck,” to let school officials know what they thought. Most of the votes for foods including burritos, pasta and chicken fettucine were “yummy,” but some, such as the chickenless nuggets, received mostly “OK” votes.

Ohlone third-grader Catherine Volpe usually buys her lunch at school, and said that although she didn’t know what organic meant, she liked the food better.

“It was delicious,” she said. “It just tasted a little better and a bunch of things were much more healthy.”

Berkeley Unified School District decided more than a year ago to get many of its ingredients from local organic farmers or from its school gardens.

Palo Alto Unified won’t be switching its meal provider. Instead, the district is working with Sodexho, the Maryland-based food service giant, to provide organic lunches to three elementary schools, and then possibly expanding it to 14 other district schools. Because Sodexho works in schools nationally, the district is hoping the change catches on.

“This can happen everywhere if people support it,” said Jesse Cool, a member of Palo Alto’s Healthy School Lunches committee. “Hopefully, organic is not elitist any more. All kids deserve to have it.”

But if the change to organic is made, kids may not see a drastic overhaul of lunch menus. They’ll still be able to get pizza and cookies.

“We’re trying to do the food they’re used to eating, but maybe make it taste a little better and be a little healthier,” Cool said.

The change could affect cost, said Alva Spence, area manager for Sodexho and food service consultant for the district. Currently, school lunches cost students about $2.20. The price of milk alone could rise about 50 cents for an 8-ounce carton when the move is made to organic, Spence said.

That wouldn’t deter Kristi Vandivier, whose two sons attend second and fourth grade at Ohlone. Vandivier’s children bring their lunches, which she says are healthier than the meals the school already offers.

In 1813, the commander of the U.S. frigate Chesapeake, Capt. James Lawrence, said, “Don’t give up the ship” during a losing battle with a British frigate.

In 1868, James Buchanan, the 15th president of the United States, died near Lancaster, Pa.

In 1926, actress Marilyn Monroe was born in Los Angeles.

Ten years ago

The U.S. Treasury Department, responding to U.N. sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia, froze an estimated $200 million in assets of the Serb-led Yugoslav government. The Pittsburgh Penguins completed a four-game sweep of the Chicago Blackhawks to win hockey’s Stanley Cup for the second straight year.

Five years ago

Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, was fatally burned in a fire set by her 12-year-old grandson in her Yonkers, N.Y., apartment. The Broadway show “Titanic” won five Tony Awards, including best musical.

One year ago

A suicide bomber attacked a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing himself and 21 Israelis. The king, queen and seven other members of Nepal’s royal family were slain by Crown Prince Dipendra, who then mortally wounded himself. “Dennis the Menace” creator Hank Ketcham died in Pebble Beach, Calif., at age 81.

On June 29, 1776, the Virginia state constitution was adopted, and Patrick Henry made governor.

On this date:

In 1767, the British Parliament approved the Townshend Revenue Acts, which imposed import duties on certain goods shipped to America. Colonists bitterly protested the Acts, which were repealed in 1770.

In 1946, British authorities arrested more than 2,700 Jews in Palestine in an attempt to stamp out alleged terrorism.

In 1949, the government of South Africa enacted a ban against racially-mixed marriages.

Ten years ago: A divided Supreme Court ruled that women have a constitutional right to abortion, but the justices also weakened the right as defined by the Roe v. Wade decision. The remains of Polish statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski, interred for five decades in the United States, were returned to his homeland in keeping with his wish to be buried only in a free Poland.

Five years ago: In Albania, gunmen menaced voters, burned ballots and pressured polling officials, marring parliamentary elections meant to steer the country toward recovery after months of chaos.

One year ago: Vice President Dick Cheney, experiencing heart problems for the third time since the November election, announced he was going back to the hospital, where he expected doctors to implant a pacemaker to even out a rapid heartbeat. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was elected to a second term.

A pastor and a retired airline pilot from Northern California, both experienced mountain climbers, were among the nine people who tumbled into a crevasse on Oregon’s Mount Hood on Thursday, the pastor’s wife told The Associated Press.

Rev. Thomas Hillman, 45, of Windsor, Calif., was hiking down from the summit with a group that included his friend John Biggs, Hillman’s wife, Holly, said in a phone interview Thursday night from the couple’s Windsor home in Sonoma County.

He was hospitalized with a head injury but was able to talk with her briefly by phone and described the accident to her, she said. She didn’t know the condition of his friend.

Three people died on the mountain, and a helicopter crashed and rolled down a snowy slope during an attempted rescue. Two climbers and two people in the copter were injured.

Mrs. Hillman, who like her husband is a pastor at the Windsor Community Methodist Church, said he and Biggs were among two groups of climbers who were about 800 feet from the 11,240-foot summit when the tragedy occurred.

She said the other group lost its footing and crashed into the group that included Biggs and Hillman.

“That sent John flying down the slope,” she said. “Tom did all he could to stop the fall, but the other team got tangled with John and got tangled up in the crevasse.”

Hillman said her 45-year-old husband was an emergency medical technician and captain of a fire crew before becoming a pastor.

“He’s very, very safe. If you had to have a safe partner, that’s who Tom was,” she said.

Both her husband and Biggs are avid climbers who have scaled mountains across the country, Hillman said. They climbed mountains in Montana and Wyoming last year.

“It’s the challenge and the exhilaration of being on top of God’s creation,” she said.

Biggs, a retired pilot for United Air Lines, is a member of the Hillmans’ church.

Columns

ASHFORD, Wash. – The four friends whose trek to the summit of Mount Rainier ended in disaster and three deaths were expert climbers in search of the breathless views at the top of the region’s rugged mountain ranges, their friends say.

“I don’t think they were beyond their ability,” said Keith Pearen, president of Mountaineering Club at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Three of the four climbers were OSU students and club members.

“It’s just that, sometimes, things like this happen,” Pearen said as friends gathered at a park to remember those who died — Keeta Owens, 21, of Lebanon, Ore., and two German climbers: Cornelius Beilharz, 26, of Stuttgart and Grit Kleinschmidt, 26, of Dresden, who was here visiting.

Autopsies on Beilharz, a computer-engineering graduate student at OSU, and Kleinschmidt were scheduled late Friday. Owens, an animal-sciences major originally from Alaska, died of blunt head and neck trauma, the medical examiner’s office reported.

“I just can’t imagine not seeing her again,” said Donna Yanik, who owns a ranch in Lebanon, Ore., where Owens lived and kept her animals, including a thoroughbred named Quinton. “She was part of our family.”

Yanik told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer she and Owens had talked about the climbing trip last week, and Owens had promised they would not attempt the climb if the weather was bad.

“She was a very conscientious person,” Yanik added. “I’m sure she wouldn’t try it if she wasn’t sure it was OK.”

But the weather took the climbers by surprise.

Just one of the party survived — the 29-year-old group leader, Andreas Kurth, who fell from their precarious emergency campsite before dawn Wednesday and then set out for help. Park spokeswoman Lee Taylor released Kurth’s name Friday, but his hometown in Germany was not provided and Taylor could not immediately be reached for further information.

He managed to contact rescuers using a cell phone from another climbing party he met at St. Elmo’s Pass at the 7,800-foot level. But by the time rescuers reached the peak late Wednesday, all three of the others had fallen to their deaths in high winds and whiteout conditions, park spokesman Maria Gillett said.

The climbers had set out Saturday, hoping to summit on Monday. Deep snow slowed them down, and by the time they reached the summit by way of Liberty Ridge — a tough, challenging climb — the weather had turned for the deadly worst.

They huddled just below the 14,411-foot summit, struggling to build snow shelters when 60 mph winds snapped their tent poles and left them exposed to whiteout conditions. When Beilharz fell and the completed shelter collapsed, Kurth tried to put together a makeshift shelter for the two women, said Gillett and park spokeswoman Lee Taylor.

When he went to see to their fallen friend, Kurth fell himself and damaged his climbing boot so he was unable to return to the women near the summit. Instead, he set out for help.

Kurth told rangers both women were still alive at the collapsed snow caves when he left at about 4 a.m. Wednesday to seek help, Gillett said, but sometime after that, it appears both women fell as well.

Owens landed near Beilharz, where her body was found Wednesday. Kleinschmidt landed in a nearby crevasse. Rangers were able to retrieve her body with ropes on Thursday, Taylor said.

Mount Rainier, the highest peak in the Pacific Northwest, is about 60 miles southeast of Seattle.

“Mount Rainier makes its own weather,” Gillett said Wednesday. “You can see sunny skies and five minutes later see clouds come in, and the weather can change very, very quickly.”

Thirteen climbers have died on Liberty Cap and Liberty Ridge since 1968, including three men who died while climbing together on May 13, 1988.

HONOLULU — Tia Carrere, born and raised in Honolulu, says her latest role is particularly special to her — even if she’s nowhere to be seen on screen.

Carrere provides the voice for Nani, the older sister in Disney’s new animated movie “Lilo & Stitch,” which is set on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

“I have this love for Hawaii and to be able to represent Hawaii — this is a big film and it’s all about Hawaii and ohana, ‘family’ — it’s the perfect fit,” said Carrere, 35.

Nani — who must be both sister and guardian to the mischievous Lilo — is a far cry from Carrere’s role as Sydney Fox, the Indiana Jones-like history professor in the syndicated TV series “Relic Hunter.”

“Lilo & Stitch” is the first animated film part for Carrere, whose roles have ranged from Mike Myers’ love interest in “Wayne’s World” to a secret agent opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in “True Lies.”

She also has agreed to voice Nani for an animated TV series based on the movie, which is about a lonely little girl who, with the help of a mischievous space alien, helps rediscover her sense of family and belonging.

Also lending his voice to the movie is Jason Scott Lee, who moved to Hawaii when he was 2 and lives on a farm on the Big Island.

Carrere said it was important to both of them that Hawaii be depicted accurately, including the way the characters speak the local pidgin English.

Q: Are you satisfied with how Hawaii comes across in the movie?

A: Absolutely. I think it’s going to make people want to come to Hawaii because of how good it makes them feel when they watch it in the film.

It’s the feeling of togetherness and family, and it’s so beautiful the way it’s hand-drawn — the watercolors and everything — it really gives you a feeling of how lush and gorgeous Hawaii is.

Q:. How is working on an animated feature different from your other projects?

A: It’s very different in that you have no idea what the finished product is going to look like. ... You’re really shooting blindly and trusting the directors to point you in the right direction — where you’re supposed to be and how big your (voice is) supposed to be, and calibrating the performance.

Q: Would you do it again?

A: Oh, absolutely. When it’s a Disney animated feature — and this is the way I sold it to Jason — I said, ‘You have to do it. It’s something that’s there for all posterity, and we’re representing Hawaii on top of it.’

It’s a history. It’s an archive of family entertainment from ‘Dumbo,’ to ‘Bambi’ to ‘The Little Mermaid’ — all these films are some of my favorite films and to think that I’ll be part of it forever and for my children, if and when I have them, and my children’s children, it will always be there. I’m sure that’s why a lot of stars do it.

Q: What was it like hearing your voice coming from an animated character?

A: It was unnerving. The first time I saw it, it was very distracting ... It’s weird hearing your voice coming out of somebody that doesn’t look like you.

Q: What’s next in your career?

A: If I could figure out a way to live in Hawaii and make a living, my life would be complete. To live on the beach in Hawaii and make a living — that would be my idea of heaven.

TIMBERLINE LODGE, Ore. – Cleve Joiner, who has made a career rescuing others, watched in disbelief as his 14-year-old son slid down an icy slope into a crevasse on Mount Hood along with eight other climbers.

It was the beginning of a chain reaction that killed three other climbers and led to the crash of an Air Force Reserve helicopter on Thursday.

“There were three teams,” Joiner said Friday, the day after the calamity. “There was a team at the very top, a team in the middle, and then the team that my son was on, three of them above the crevasse, and then we were on the opposite side.”

Many of the details remain unclear, lost in a swirl of steel ice axes, nylon climbing ropes and terror. It began just after 9 a.m.

“The top team lost their footing, took out the next four, then took out my son and them, knocked them down, and then they went into the crevasse,” Joiner said on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America. They were climbing with other firemen trained in first aid.

“It happened so quick that it was hard to think about what it was like,” said Cole Joiner, a high school freshman. “I just remember seeing climbers come down at me and then being in the hole.”

A number of them rushed to the edge of the 25-foot deep cleft, including Dr. Steve Boyer, a Portland emergency room physician. Climbers took ropes from the Joiner party and began preparing for what proved to be a daylong rescue operation.

“What really was fortunate was there were lots of well-trained paramedics there before I arrived,” said Boyer.

“They had set up a nice pulley system and I immediately went down into the crevasse to help with the decision of who had treatable injuries ... and making triage decisions who should come out of the crevasse first.”

Rescue parties began arriving on foot, and military helicopters were sent to carry victims. Two hours after the first accident, Cole Joiner was pulled from the crevasse, and hugged his father.

A Pave Hawk helicopter lifted a seriously injured climber off the mountain, returned for another, and was preparing to hoist a third aboard when the pilot lost control.

Boyer blamed it on a wind shift, but the Air Force Reserve was just beginning its investigation and had not released a cause of the accident.

The helicopter veered away from the cluster of rescuers around the crevasse and a crewman released the cable to the waiting gurney, in an apparent effort to avoid further casualties.

“The wind changed, they lost their air power,” Boyer said. “I glanced over my left shoulder .... I saw that they were losing power, and I thought, ’Oh my God! They are going crash!”

The chopper’s nose touched the snow, it appeared to right itself, and then the uphill rotor dug into the slope. The blades spun off the aircraft, which tumbled down the hill, tossing out all four crewmembers, according to witnesses and videotape of the incident.

“It is a miracle that no one had major injuries,” said Boyer.

A California man, John Biggs, 62, of Windsor, was confirmed Friday as among the three killed. The others were William Gordon Ward, 49, and Richard T. Read, 48, both of Forest Grove.

Biggs was climbing with the Rev. Thomas Hillman, 45, also of Windsor, Hillman’s wife Holly said. She said she had spoken by telephone with her husband in the hospital where he was being treated for a head injury, but that he had offered few details.

“He’s just so fuzzy-minded,” she said. “He was unconscious for a long time.”

She said another group lost its footing and crashed into Biggs and Hillman.

“That sent John flying down the slope,” she said. “Tom did all he could to stop the fall, but the other team got tangled with John and got tangled up in the crevasse.”

Rescuers went up Mount Hood early Friday to retrieve the last of three climbers killed, and the Air Force announced that an investigating team would be on the mountain within 24 to 48 hours.

BALTIMORE — “The Wire” is only nominally about Baltimore detectives’ protracted investigation of a drug gang in the city’s west side housing projects — it’s also a conduit for David Simon’s exploration of the futility of the drug war and the pervasiveness of corporate culture.

In Simon’s view, the police department and the drug organization are dysfunctional corporations that treat their employees as expendable and have lost touch with the public they serve, existing just to sustain themselves; and his two protagonists — homicide detective James McNulty (Dominic West) and midlevel drug dealer D’Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard Jr.) — are frustrated middlemen whose iconoclasm puts them at odds with their bosses.

“McNulty’s working for Enron, and so is D’Angelo Barksdale,” Simon, the show’s creator and executive producer, said during a location shoot on Baltimore’s notoriously violent Pennsylvania Avenue.

“What we’re trying to do is a TV show that is masquerading as a cop show, but it’s really about what happens when a policy goes awry and bureaucracies become entrenched,” said Simon. “The police bureaucracy is fixed and permanent, and the drug bureaucracy equally so, and they both treat their middle management the same.”

The 13-episode series (whose fifth episode airs Sunday at 10 p.m. EDT) kicked off with McNulty sitting in on Barksdale’s murder trial. The young killer walked free after his cohorts intimidated witnesses. Afterward, for motives that remain unclear, McNulty spilled his guts to the trial judge about the drug gang run by Barksdale’s uncle, Avon, and the 10 murders it has committed without a conviction.

The confession creates a whirlwind of shakedowns and finger-pointing within the police department, and McNulty is banished to the narcotics unit to try to bring a case against the Barksdale crew and placate the judge. But the department clearly isn’t committed to the kind of investigation — with wiretaps and sophisticated surveillance — that would net any major arrests.

Meanwhile, Barksdale is banished by his uncle to a low-rise housing project, where he becomes increasingly disillusioned with the violence necessary to sustain the drug trade.

Simon, a former police reporter for The (Baltimore) Sun, previously worked on two other Baltimore-based TV shows — “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “The Corner.” But he wanted to return to the streets of Baltimore because there were aspects of the police department and the drug war he hadn’t yet explored.

“This is the department I covered in all its dysfunctional glory, where everybody was careerist and where nobody lost their pension by failing to do police work,” Simon said.

The show’s comprehensive look at a drug organization comes largely from Edward Burns, Simon’s co-writer, who was a Baltimore detective for 20 years and specialized in the kind of protracted investigations that “The Wire” dramatizes — investigations that, in the end, did little to change the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

“Whatever damage that the drugs themselves haven’t done to these neighborhoods, the war against them has managed to do,” Simon said. “It’s impaired the police department, it’s alienated whole subcultures of Americans, and it’s solved nothing.”

Very little is disguised in “The Wire,” from the blighted locations full of vacant lots and gutted, boarded-up row houses to the back-stabbing and dishonesty in the police department’s downtown headquarters.

The grittiness extends to the actors, most of whom don’t have Hollywood looks — except, perhaps, for West as McNulty.

West, a native of Sheffield, England, is starring in his first series after a run of supporting roles in films including ”28 Days” and “Rock Star.” During a chat in his trailer, he’s self-effacing about his uneasiness playing a Baltimore detective and his attempts to lick the American accent.

“It’s a dream for an actor to do something that’s completely alien, and this really is completely alien to me,” West said.

Not so for Simon. He’s showing the world as he sees it, and makes no apologies about using a TV drama to explore widespread political and social malaise.

For that reason, “The Wire” will likely have to work harder to build an audience than HBO’s breakout hits “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under.”

Simon hopes his audience will be patient.

“We can’t pay viewers off with an arrest or a victory or a solidifying sense of accomplishment every episode,” he said. “We’re after something different, and hopefully the payoff is much more resonant and much more meaningful.”

JACKSON, Miss. — China’s Wu Haiyan says performing with the best dancers in the world was as great an honor as the gold medal she received in USA International Ballet Competition.

Haiyan was awarded the gold medal in the senior women’s division on Friday. The competition closes Sunday with a performance by medal winners.

The USA IBC is the United States’ official international ballet competition. The two-week competition is held every four years in Jackson. About 100 dancers from 24 countries competed this year.

Speaking through an interpreter, Haiyan said she hopes the experience she gained during her first international performance will help her “give more beautiful performances to audiences around the world.”

“This is a new beginning for me,” she said. “In the future I will make a great effort to achieve more.”

Haiyan, 23, performs with the Central Ballet in Beijing, also known as the National Ballet. She’s been dancing since she was 10 years old.

American dancer Joseph Phillips, a native of Columbia, S.C., took the gold in the men’s junior division. Phillips, a 16-year-old student at the North Carolina School for the Arts, said he plans to pursue a career in classical ballet.

“I just think it was a dream and it just came true,” Phillips said.

No gold medals were awarded in the men’s senior or women’s junior divisions.

Bruce Marks, chairman of the international jury, said gold medals are not always awarded because dancers are judged on international standards.

“We are comparing these youngsters to the best dancers around,” he said.

Medalists in each of four divisions receive cash prizes, Marks said. The jury also awarded special awards and scholarships to some finalists who did not medal.

CAMDEN, N.J.— When Colombian singer Shakira takes the amphitheater stage in this teen-pop concert, girls in the crowd wave their hands in the air and squeal. Then they whip out their cell phones and call a friend.

Mobile phones have quickly become a popular concert accessory. Fans call friends to brag about the show and hold up their phones so others can hear a favorite song.

At a recent concert at the Tweeter Center in Camden, the crowd was dotted with tiny cell phones — Nokias and Motorolas in pink, silver and blue.

Connelly sways back and forth with the crowd, her phone above her head in one hand.

“She did it for Britney Spears and now for this,” says her friend Megan McGorman, 18, on the other end of the line at home in Ridley Park.

Sue Aiello, 19, is sitting on the grass with three friends, all wearing tank tops and chatting on cell phones. She plans to call friends when Ja Rule comes on later. “They’re working and I’m not,” she explains.

Of course, not everybody at the concert is calling to share the music or show off.

“I called in between songs to check on my son,” said Jennifer Ritchie, 21, of Leesburg, N.J.

And many parents insist their teens take a phone to a concert for safety’s sake, or to let parents know where and when to pick them up.

Concert promoter Butch Stone of Little Rock, Ark., says he’s never heard artists complain about cell-phone use during performances or raise questions about whether people on the other end of the phone might be recording the show.

“In terms of piracy, I don’t think the technology is there,” he said.

“Our policy is this: Unless the artist objects, we don’t restrict cell phones or cameras. I can’t recall the artist ever having a problem.”

The concert calls are just part of cell phones’ overall popularity with young people, said Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Raney.

“People from 18 to 24 are coming of age in a technological era. Because so many of them have them now, they’re getting more creative in how they use them,” she said.

She also said “people are text messaging everything from ’Meet me at the concert’ to ’Where are you?”’

Jodi Heyman, 25, holds out her phone during a song by the boisterous O-Town. She leaves a message for her brother, who’s in the military.